Our experimental analysis of alliances in conflicts leads to three main findings. First, even in the absence of repeated interaction, direct contact or communication, free-riding among alliance members is far less pronounced than what would be expected from non-cooperative theory. Second, this...

Recent international climate negotiations suggest that complete agreements are unlikely to materialize. Instead, partial cooperation between like-minded countries appears a more likely outcome. In this paper we analyze the effects of such partial cooperation between like-minded countries. In...

After World War II, town twinning became popular, notably in Germany. This was mainly a reaction to the war experience, and it was aimed at creating renewed international understanding and co-operation between German cities and cities in other countries. The contacts created by town twinning...

This paper analyzes the setting of national patent policies in the global economy. In the standard model with free trade and social-welfare-maximizing governments à la Grossman and Lai (2004), cross-border positive policy externalities induce individual countries to select patent strengths that...

Over the past 70 years, the number of international environmental agreements (IEAs) has increased substantially, highlighting their prominent role in environmental governance. This paper applies the toolkit of network analysis to identify the network properties of international environmental...

We propose an immigration policy based on the model of cooperatives. Incoming migrants have to acquire a participation certificate. In exchange, the immigrants may enter the country of choice without danger. The revenue goes to the country of the recipient nation rather than to human smugglers....

We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of foreign aid on economic growth in a sample of 96 recipient countries over the 1974-2009 period. We interact donor government fractionalization with a recipient country's probability of receiving aid. The results show that fractionalization...

We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Donor countries ́political motives might reduce the effectiveness of conditionality, channel aid to inferior projects or affect the way aid is spent in other ways, reduce the aid bureaucracyś...

In this paper, foreign aid transfers can distort individual incentives, and hence hurt growth, by encouraging rent-seeking as opposed to productive activities. We construct a model of a small growing open economy that distinguishes two effects from foreign transfers: (i) a direct positive...