The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily in terms of publications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outside world are far more extensive and recently developed...

An integrated assessment (IA) model combines knowledge from very different disciplines in view of a practical problem. Most models developed so far are rather monolithic in the sense that it is difficult to combine components from different models for purposes of new assessments. We propose to...

China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs. Heterogeneity of trust beliefs in the population, coupled with the tendency of individuals to extrapolate...

This paper provides an introduction to the concept of social capital, and carries out a critical review of the empirical literature on social capital and economic development. The survey points out six main weaknesses affecting the empirics of social capital. Identified weaknesses are then used...

The aim of this paper is to investigate, empirically, what components of the public spending imply a decreasing effect on the organized crime and what components create opportunities for the organized crime, discussing also the role of government efficiency. The findings show a strikingly...

The theory of international environmental agreements overwhelmingly assumes that governments engage as unitary agents. Each government makes choices based on benefits and costs that are simple national aggregates, and similarly on a single set of national-level motivations, together drawing a...

We model a bipartite network in which links connect agents with public goods. Agents play a voluntary contribution game in which they decide how much to contribute to each public good they are connected to. We show that the problem of finding a Nash equilibrium can be posed as a non-linear...

Ecological reserve networks are an important strategy for conserving biodiversity. One approach to selecting reserves is to use optimization algorithms that maximize an ecological objective function subject to a total reserve area constraint. Under this approach, economic factors such as...

This article provides a non-technical overview of important results of the game theoretical literature on the formation and stability of international environmental agreements (IEAs) on transboundary pollution control. It starts out by sketching features of first and second best solutions to the...