The social norm of unemployment suggests that aggregate unemployment reduces the well-being of the employed, but has a far smaller effect on the unemployed. We use German panel data to reproduce this standard result, but then suggest that the appropriate distinction may not be between employment...

Does the cultural background influence the success with which genetically unrelated individuals cooperate in social dilemma situations? In this paper we provide an answer by analyzing the data of Herrmann et al. (Science 2008, pp. 1362-1367), who study cooperation and punishment in sixteen...

If a coalition of countries implements climate policies, nonparticipants tend to consume more, pollute more, and invest too little in renewable energy sources. In response, the coalition's equilibrium policy distorts trade and it is not time consistent. By adding a market for the right to...

A well-recognized problem in the multitasking literature is that workers might substantially reduce their effort on tasks that produce unobservable outputs as they seek the salient rewards to observable outputs. Since the theory related to multitasking is decades ahead of the empirical evidence,...

We study how harmonization of corporate tax systems affects the stability of international cartels. We show that tax base harmonization reinforces collusive agreements, while harmonization of corporate tax rates may destabilize or stabilize cartels. We also find that bilateral and full...

Afriat (1967) showed the equivalence of the strong axiom of revealed preference and the existence of a solution to a set of linear inequalities. From this solution he constructed a utility function rationalizing the choices of a competitive consumer. We extend Afriat's theorem to a class of...

In this paper we identify conditions under which the introduction of a pay-as-you-go social security system is ex-ante Pareto-improving in a stochastic overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation and land. We argue that these conditions are consistent with many calibrations of the...

This study explores the effects of labor and product market deregulation on employment growth. Our empirical results, based on an OECD country panel from 1990-2004, suggest that lower levels of product and labor market regulation foster employment growth, including through sizable interaction...

This article studies the relationship between debt policies of multinational companies (MNCs) and governments' tax strategies. In the first part, it is shown that the ability to shift income from high- to low-tax countries affects MNCs' financial choices. In the second part we show how MNCs'...

This paper examines the role of bequests and of taxation on bequests for the distribution of wealth. We investigate a model with overlapping generations and heterogenous households where parents derive utility directly from their bequests. Using the coefficient of variation as the measure of...