Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause considerable damage. Agency theory's insistence on linking the compensation of managers and directors as closely as possible to firm performance is a major reason for these scandals. They cannot be...

Management research has long focused on the theory of the firm, studying for-profit organizations that produce privately owned resources based on central authority and within well-defined boundaries. In recent times, a new kind of enterprise has emerged that we call Community Enterprises. They...

Over the last decades, the internationalization of the value chain has allowed firms to exploit cross-country differences in environmental and labor regulation (and enforcement) in ways that have led to a large number of NGO campaigns and consumer boycotts criticizing ‘unethical’ practices....

We develop a general framework to study contests, containing the well-known models of Tullock (1980) and Lazear & Rosen (1981) as special cases. The contest outcome depends on players' effort and skill, the latter being subject to symmetric uncertainty. The model is tractable, because a...

We develop a general framework to study contests, containing the well-known models of Tullock (1980) and Lazear & Rosen (1981) as special cases. The contest outcome depends on players' effort and skill, the latter being subject to symmetric uncertainty. The model is tractable, because a...

We analyse tax competition with corporate income taxes in a common market where tax revenues are allocated according to an apportionment formula. Generally, tax competition is sharper (i.e., equilibrium tax rates are lower) the more tax-elastic is the apportionment formula. This depends on the...

Over the last several decades, both economists and political scientists have shown interest in coups d'état. Numerous studies have been dedicated to understanding the causes of coups. However, model uncertainty still looms large. About one hundred potential determinants of coups have been...

Can a major shock in childhood permanently shape trust? We consider a hunger episode in Germany after WWII and construct a measure of hunger exposure from official data on caloric rations set monthly by the occupying forces providing regional and temporal variation. We correlate hunger exposure...

This paper studies the effects of bilateral foreign aid on conflict escalation and de-escalation. We make three major contributions. First, we combine data on civil wars with data on low level conflicts in a new ordinal measure capturing the two-sided and multifaceted nature of conflict. Second,...