The word “scapegoat” is defined as “a person made to bear the blame for others,” and similarly, “scapegoatism” refers to “the act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself” (Collins English Dictionary and...

This study provides empirical patterns regarding trans people's self-esteem-oriented reflections during observations of positive workplace actions. The case of a 2015 UK workplace guide is utilized to fulfil our aims. We adopt Rawls' political philosophy framework in order to evaluate whether...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. In this paper, we regress monthly hires across all firms in Portugal with some degree of public ownership on the country's 1980-2018 political cycle. We...

We explore the relationship between government size and economic growth in an endogenous growth model with human capital and an unproductive capital which facilitates rent-seeking. With exogenous as well as endogenous time discounting, we find a non-monotonic relationship between the size of...

In "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy", Robert D. Woodberry (2012) claims that the emergence of stable democracies around the world was influenced by conversionary Protestantism. While Woodberry's historical analysis is exhaustive, the accompanying empirical evidence suffers from severe...

Corruption is pervasive, but we know little about its effects on individual lives. This paper examines whether living in a corrupt society has deleterious effects on health. Using individual-level data from 28 post-communist countries, we demonstrate that bribing for public services worsens...

Regional movements are emerging in Europe, often to promote historical, cultural or economic regions. Are we going to have a new regional Europe with 60 regions instead of 27 nation-states?

This paper investigates the causal effects of agglomeration on hours worked by the self-employed. The IV estimations instrument for urbanization and localization using the minimum distance from the work Public Use Microdata Area centroid to the United States’ coastlines and estimated industry...

Over the last 50 years, London has successfully adapted to technological change and globalization, making it the major driver of the UK economy. But its strengths have also made the city particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of COVID-19, and potentially also to wider negative economic...

This paper studies whether research universities can boost regional economic development through an exogenous shock of a forced relocation of a research university in China. We analyze the development in the treated regions compared with a set of control regions that are created using the...