Promise competition is prevalent in many economic environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. We study the value of transparency for promise competition and ask whether promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations when outcomes do not allow for observing...

Within the economic profession, it is a widely held view that the fiscal criteria of the Maastricht treaty are arbitrary numbers without economic foundation. Much of this criticism seems to overlook an important aspect - the strategic dimension of the criteria. This paper focuses on one...

In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understand the gift giver’s intention. Our...

We construct a dynamic model of two-sided sorting in labor markets with multi-dimensional agent and firm heterogeneity. We apply it to study optimal party structure and the decision of how (de)centralized candidate recruitment should be. Parties are non-unitary actors and compete at the local...

In this paper, I test the effects of religious norms on the provision of public goods. My evidence is drawn from public goods experiments that I ran with regional bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Russia. I introduce three treatments, which I define as degrees of Eastern Orthodox...

In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as a stochastically set demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards....

We use a laboratory experiment to study the impact of transparency on reducing corruption in contexts where embezzlement and bribery can co-occur. These contexts are closely related to grand corruption settings, where different types of corruption occur and allow people in power to take...

We construct a dynamic model of two-sided sorting in labor markets with multi-dimensional agent and firm heterogeneity. We apply it to study optimal party structure and the decision of how (de)centralized candidate recruitment should be. Parties are non-unitary actors and compete at the local...

This paper studies the existence of election cycles in public procurement in the European Union for the national level. We analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the contract, and the project completion. We point out...