Gift exchange experiments have demonstrated that norms can affect labor market outcomes and provided an explanation for involuntary unemployment. However, conflicting results from laboratory and field experiments have questioned the relevance of gift exchange and helped spark an ongoing debate...

Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

Experimental and behavioral economics are well established branches in the economic science. This essay presents and discusses some results and behavioral regularities from these fields which are of potential importance for public policy. After a brief introduction of what experimental and...

Credit booms have globally fuelled hikes in stock, raw material and real estate markets which have culminated in the recent US subprime market crisis. We explain the global asset market booms since the mid 1980s based on the overinvestment theories of Hayek, Wicksell and Schumpeter. We argue...

The business cycles theories of Wicksell (1898), Schumpeter (1912), Mises (1912), Hayek (1929, 1935) and Minsky (1986, 1992) explain business cycles by distorted prices on capital markets, buoyant credit expansion and overinvestment. The exuberance during the boom endogenously causes the...

A large and growing literature has demonstrated that explicit incentives, such as enforceable contracts, can lead agents to withhold effort. We investigate when this behavioral result arises. In an extensive laboratory experiment, we find that imposing control through an enforceable contract is...

Economists are increasingly turning to the experimental method as a means to estimate causal effects. By using randomization to identify key treatment effects, theories previously viewed as untestable are now scrutinized, efficacy of public policies are now more easily verified, and stakeholders...

We summarise our two sets of controlled experiments designed to see if single-sex classes within coeducational environments modify studentsf risk]taking attitudes. In Booth and Nolen (2012b), subjects are in years 10 and 11, while in Booth, Cardona]Sosa and Nolen (2014), they are...

This chapter presents some insights from basic behavioural research on the role of human pro-social motivation to maintain social order. I argue that social order can be conceptualized as a public good game. Past attempts to explain social order typically relied on the assumption of selfish and...

This paper studies gender differences in strategic situations. In two experimental guessing games - the beauty contest and the 11-20 money request game - we analyze the depth of strategic reasoning of women and men. We use unique data from an internet experiment with more than 1,000...