This paper exploits a short-lived cooperation program between the U.S.S.R. and China, which led to the construction of 156 “Million-Rouble plants” in the 1950s. We isolate exogenous variation in location decisions due to the relative position of allied and enemy airbases and study the...

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration episode that started in the late 1990s strongly affected political preferences and electoral outcomes in Moldova during the following...

Recently collected data show that, within any manufacturing industry, vertically integrated firms tend to have larger, higher productivity plants, account for the bulk of sales, and also sell externally most of the inputs they produce. In a weak contracting environment characteristic of...

Information asymmetries can prevent markets from operating efficiently. An important example is the labor market, where employers face uncertainty about the productivity of job candidates. We examine theoretically and with laboratory experiments three key questions related to hiring via...

We relate tax evasion behavior to a substantial literature on self and social comparison in judgements. Tax payers engage in tax evasion as a means to boost their expected consumption relative to others in their “local” social network, and relative to past consumption. The unique Nash...

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical 'Tullock Challenges'. The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook,...

We study the influence of family members, neighbors and coworkers on retirement behavior. To estimate causal retirement spillovers between individuals, we exploit a pension reform in the Netherlands that creates exogenous variation in peers' retirement ages, and we use administrative data on the...

The recent house price experiences within an individual’s social network affect her perceptions of the attractiveness of property investments, and through this channel have large effects on her housing market activity. Our data combine anonymized social network information from Facebook with...

This paper studies the social and economic responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in a large sample of countries. I stress, in particular, the importance of countries' interconnections to un-derstand the spread of the virus. I estimate a Global VAR model and exploit a dataset on existing social...

We review an empirical literature that studies the role of social interactions in driving economic and financial decision making. We first summarize recent work that documents an important role of social interactions in explaining household decisions in housing and mortgage markets. This...