This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems as a means to finance unemployment benefits: a...

This paper reports the results from a laboratory experiment investigating a manager's decision whether or not to delegate authority to a better informed worker whose interests are often, but not always, congruent. Keeping authority implies a loss of information, as the worker communicates his...

An important feature of bond markets is the relationship between initial public offering prices and the probability of the issuer defaulting. First, this probability affects bond prices. Second, IPO prices determine the default probability. Though the market equilibrium has been shown to predict...

Why do people in rich countries not transfer more of their income to people in the world's poorest countries? To study this question and the relative importance of needs, entitlements, and nationality in people's social preferences, we conducted a real effort fairness experiment where people in...

Expectations play a crucial role in modern macroeconomic models. We replace the common assumption of rational expectations in a New Keynesian framework by the assumption that expectations are formed according to a heuristics switching model that has performed well in earlier work. We show how...

This paper reports the results of a cross-country comparison between Austria andJapan for an experimental 3-personcoalition formation ultimatum game. The experimental design allows thecomparison with respect to three decisions. (i)The coalition decision, (ii) proposers' demand behavior in 2- and...

In this paper we investigate experimentally the functioning of a wage tax financed unemployment benefit system on the development of the budget deficit, unemployment, and some other indicators of economic performance in an international economy. We find support for the hypothesis that...

We investigate experimentally the economic effects of wage taxation to finance unemployment benefits for a closed economy and an international economy. The main findings are the following. (i) There is clear evidence of a vicious circle in the dynamic interaction between the wage tax and...

We study the trip scheduling preferences of train commuters in a real-life setting. The underlying data have been collected during large-scale peak avoidance experiment conducted in the Netherlands, in which participants could earn monetary rewards for traveling outside peak hours. The...

This paper investigates how social interactions impact the decision to participate in one’s local environment. Existing work often reports correlations between social interactions and local participation, but it is unclear what the causal direction of this relationship is. A key contribution...