This paper presents a model of private provision of a public good where individuals in a group have altruistic preferences and care about the private and public good consumption of the other members of the group. I show that increasing the level of altruism increases the Nash level of the public...

We study conflict between two groups of individuals. Using Schaffer's (1988) concept of evolutionary stability we provide an evolutionary underpinning for in-group altruism combined with spiteful behavior towards members of the rival out-group. We characterize the set of evolutionarily stable...

We conduct a large-scale survey experiment in nine European countries to study how priming a major crisis (COVID-19), common economic interests, and a shared identity influences altruism, reciprocity and trust of EU citizens. We find that priming the COVID-19 pandemic increases altruism and...

Recently, early investments in the human capital of children from socially disadvantaged environments have attracted a great deal of attention. Programs of such early intervention, aiming at children's health and well-being, are spreading considerably in the U.S. and are currently tested in...

The usual method of solving for an optimal nonlinear tax schedule is that of the primal approach -- first solving for the optimal allocation, and subsequently determining which tax system decentralizes this allocation. While this method is mathematically rigorous, it lacks intuitive appeal. I...

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is the most influential work in economics ever written. But it is neither complete nor perfect. Smith's theory of the firm, or the lack thereof, is one of the masterpiece's blind spots. Smith thought history had shown that joint stock companies cannot compete with...

This paper examines public debt as a strategic instrument in preventing secession. Using a game theoretic model, it shows that debt can be used to preempt a country's separation if the seceding region's potential gain from independence is strictly decreasing in debt. This paper identifies...

This paper studies how imposing norms on contribution behavior affects individuals' intrinsic motivation. We consider an urban area in Germany where the Catholic Church collects a local church levy as a charitable donation, despite the fact that the levy is legally a tax. In cooperation with the...

The tug-of-war between single players is known to have a non-cooperative Markov-perfect equilibrium in which both players expend zero efforts and neither player drives the Markov process to one of the terminal states. We show that these peaceful outcomes vanish if the single players are replaced...

We consider a best-of-three Tullock contest between two ex-ante identical players. An effort-maximizing designer commits to a vector of player-specific biases (advantages or disadvantages). In our benchmark model the designer chooses victory-dependent biases (i.e., the biases depend on the...