We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

There is a growing interest in morale as a potential substitute for sanctions, encouraged by exerimental evidence that people's morale affect their economic decisions. I show that while morale may be a substitute for sanctions for each citizen, it is not a substitute in the market. In a model...

This paper studies the aggregate distribution of declared opin- ions and behavior when heterogeneous individuals make the trade- off between being true to their private opinions and conforming to an endogenous social norm. The model sheds light on how various punishment regimes induce conformity...

This paper shows that peer pressure may lead to dynamic convergence to a norm that is skewed with respect to preferences in society, yet is endogenously upheld by the population. Moreover, a skewed norm will often be more sustainable than a representative norm. This may explain the skewness of...

In this paper we estimate a model of household labor supply using an econometric approch that allows simultaneous decisions of household members, complex and non-convex choice sets induced by tax and benefit rules, and quantity constraints on hours choice. The model is estimated using the 1993...

We compute a stochastic household forecast for the Netherlands by the random share method. Time series of shares of persons in nine household positions, broken down by sex and five-year age group for the years 1996-2010 are modelled by means of the Hyndman-Booth-Yasmeen product-ratio variant of...