In medieval times, most people identifi ed with religious values and aggregate income and productivity grew at glacier speed. In the 20th century, religion played a much lesser role in daily life and income and productivity grew at high and unprecedented rates. The present paper develops a...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...

From 1997 to 2005, an astonishing 5,200 million USD was invested to reduce cocaine production in Colombia, the world's main cocaine producer. However, little is known about the effectiveness of policies targeting coca cultivation. This paper uses a surveybased experiment to evaluate the effects...

Approximately 1.2% of Colombia's GNP is spent every year on the war on drugs, but very little is known about coca farming decisions at the household level. In order to understand the decision to cultivate coca as well as that of the amount of land to use for its cultivation, we develop an...

Although empowerment is seen as intrinsically important and instrumentally valuable to escape poverty, there is very little research on the empirical drivers of empowerment. Using custom-made household-level information and using advanced econometric techniques that also correct for endogeneity,...

The intense debate on the effectiveness of the war on drugs contrasts with the lack of empirical evidence on its impacts. To evaluate the effectiveness of control-supply policies, we use micro data from an original survey with farmers living in a coca growing area in Colombia. We find that while...

The ongoing political conflict between Israel and the Palestinian territories results in an increasing physical separation and societal alienation of both conflicting parties. In some contexts such as trade ongoing cooperation exists. We provide a micro-level analysis of economic interactions...

Social interactions are considered pivotal to urban agglomeration forces. This study employs a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how social interactions differ across cities and peripheral areas. We first show that geographical distance is highly detrimental to interpersonal...

Italy and Norway are characterized by different household patterns of young adults, with young Italians being more likely to live in their parents' house and young Norwegians more likely to live independently, alone or in multi-occupant households. This paper asks why, and how these differences...

This study focuses on the possible effect of gender equality and equity in the family on the transition to first, second and third births. The analysis includes the division of housework and childcare as well as the perception of whether this division is fair and just. We use a unique dataset...