This paper investigates the relation between social capital and crime. The analysis contributes to explaining why crime is so heterogeneous across space. By employing current and historical data for Dutch municipalities and by providing novel indicators to measure social capital, we find a link...

This paper examines the interactive effect of distance and trade on international conflict and cooperation. The effect of geographic distance depends on trade, while the effect of trade varies with geographic distance. Trade reduces conflict to a greater extent when dyads are geographically...

This paper considers the effect of status or relative income on work effort combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with ISSP survey data. We find a consistent negative effect of others' incomes on individual effort in both datasets. The individual's rank in the income...

Cooperation among people who are not related to each other is sustained by the availability of punishment devices which help enforce social norms (Fehr and Gc̃hter, 2002). However, the rationale for costly punishment remains unclear. This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating...

We examine the effects of social preferences and beliefs about the social preferences of others in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are reciprocally oriented. Part of the effect can be explained by a false consensus...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), this paper assesses the relationship between life satisfaction and religious practice. The main new result here is longitudinal. It is shown that individuals who become more religious over time record long term gains in life...

The transition process has had different distributional impacts across different interest groups and countries. These have led to differences in the support for transition. In this paper, we study support attitudes for both the economic and political transition using data from the New Barometer...

Recent economic literature emphasizes the importance of moral considerations to explain compliance behavior with respect to underground activities such as tax evasion. A considerable amount of research aims to identify factors that affect the intrinsic motivation to comply. However, the causal...

A substantial body of research suggests that economists are less generous than other professionals and that economics students are less generous than other students. We address this question using administrative data on donations to social programs by students at the University of Washington....

Recent literature on tax evasion emphasizes the importance of moral considerations to explain compliance behavior. As a consequence scholars aim to identify factors that shape this so-called tax morale. However, the causal link between tax morale and actual compliance behavior is not established...