Despite a significant expansion of the literature on conflicts and fragility of states, only a few systematic attempts have been made to link the theoretical literature on social conflicts to the available micro-level information about the people who are involved in these conflicts. We address...

In this paper we present a model of rational voting over redistribution where individual self-esteem and relative esteem for others are endogenously determined. Individuals differ in their productivities, and their behaviour and political views are influenced by moral standards concerning work....

This paper examines whether schooling has a positive impact on individual's political interest, voting turnout, democratic values, political involvement and political group membership, using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). Between 1949 and 1969 the number of compulsory years of...

Societies prohibit many transactions considered morally repugnant, although potentially efficiency-enhancing. We conducted an online choice experiment to characterize preferences for the morality and efficiency of payments to kidney donors. Preferences were heterogeneous, ranging from...

This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

Markets are ubiquitous in our daily life and, despite many imperfections, they are a great source of human welfare. Nevertheless, there is a heated recent debate on whether markets erode social responsibility and moral behavior. In fact, competitive pressure on markets may create strong...

We present a framework that incorporates both moral motivations and fairness considerations into utility. The main idea is that individuals face a preference trade-off between their material individual interest and their desire to follow moral norms. In our model, we assume that moral motivation...

Despite a vast literature documenting the negative effects of climate change on various socio-economic outcomes, little, if any, evidence exists on the global impacts of hotter temperature on poverty. Analyzing a new global dataset of subnational poverty in 166 countries, we find higher...

In this paper we argue that the decline in global inequality over the last decades has spurred a 'sunshine' narrative of falling global inequality that has been rather oversold, in the sense, we argue, it is likely to be temporary. We argue the decline in global inequality will reverse due to...