Marriage and divorce decisions are influenced by the institutional environment they are made in. One example is the social insurance system, which acts as a substitute for within-household insurance against economic shocks. In this paper, we quantify the importance of household-level insurance...

We develop a model where firms profit from coercing workers into employment under conditions violating national law and international conventions and where bureaucrats benefit from accepting bribes from detected perpetrators. Firms and bureaucrats are heterogeneous. Employers differ in their...

A simple integrated assessment framework that gives rules for the optimal carbon price, transition to the carbon-free era and stranded carbon assets is presented, which highlights the ethical, economic, geophysical and political drivers of optimal climate policy. For the ethics we discuss the...

Preserving environmental quality and addressing economic inequality both feature prominently in public discourse. Neither of these two issues can be fully understood in isolation, and policies aiming at one issue will increasingly have to consider interactions with the other. We synthesize...

One of the core indicators in the field of scientometrics is the number of papers published by a unit within a given period. However, such indicators can only be assessed properly by considering the unit's available resources. When evaluating the efficiency of institutions worldwide, the problem...

The offshoring of production by multinational firms has expanded dramatically in recent decades, increasing these firms’ potential for economic growth and technological transfers across countries. What determines the location of offshore production? How do countries' policies and...

We develop a simple structural model of value added tax (VAT) compliance, and estimate it using widely available national accounts data to learn about compliance in countries where little is currently known. International border controls improve VAT compliance, generating a correlation between...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

How was the birth of "Environmental Economics" related to the first Earth Day fifty years ago (April 22, 1970)? This short note introduces some ideas about an amazing burst of intellectual activity from 1968 to 1974. Environmental economics was not a field of economics before this brief period,...