Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...

Lebanon is the country with the highest density of refugees in the world, raising the question of whether the host and refugee populations can cooperate harmoniously. We conduct a lab-in-thefield experiment in Lebanon studying intra- and inter-group behavior of Syrian refugees and Lebanese...

Religious divisions have long played a primary role in major conflicts throughout much of the world. Intergroup contact may increase trust between members of different religions. However, evidence on how inter-religious contact affects individuals' behavior towards one another is scarce. We...

This study examines the causal joint effect of a new political regime and war against Iraq on life expectancy of Iranians for the period 1978–1988 during the revolution and war. I use a synthetic control approach to construct a synthetic Iran based on a weighted average of other Middle East...

This paper empirically studies the impact of decentralization on foreign aid effectiveness. For this purpose, we examine a commonly used empirical growth model, considering aid modality as well as different measures of political and fiscal decentralization. Our panel estimations reveal that...

This paper explores the role of information transmission in explaining donors ́choice between project aid and budget support. Budget support increases the involvement of recipient governments in the decision-making process and can thus be an example of a "delegation-scheme." Conversely, project...

In order to overcome the underprovision of global public goods various different policy approaches have been proposed. In the climate policy arena, international transfers are frequently seen as an effective means to raise the provision of the global public good ‘climate change mitigation’....

Countries can reduce global emissions by reducing own consumption since they are linked to the total value of consumption world wide. Two effects are at issue: a utility loss from forgone consumption and a utility gain from lowered temperature change. It is thus unclear whether own country...