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...

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...

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...

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...

Socially responsible investment in analyzed in a general equilibrium context. This is important in order to understand the ultimate consequences of SRI on the decisions of economic agents. Building on models by Brock (1982) and Merton (1987), SRI is modelled as the choice to voluntarily give up...

This paper compares stability of international environmental agreements for six different rules of coalition formation under very general conditions (any type of heterogeneity between countries). The rules can be interpreted as different institutional settings in which treaty formations take...

This paper examines factors that may influence the estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life obtained from contingent valuation surveys that elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) for mortality risk reductions. We examine the importance of distributional assumptions, the choice of the welfare...

The Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation Method can be used either in the single or double bound formulation. The former is easier to implement, while the latter is known to be more efficient. We analyse the bias of the ML estimates produced by either model, and the gain in efficiency...

Practitioners of outdoor sports, such as rock-climbers, are likely to exhibit preference heterogeneity that depends on the ‘keenness’ with which such sports are practiced. Such an intuition is born out in at least one study using latent class discrete choice modelling (Provencher et al....

We analyze the formation of self-enforcing international environmental agreements under the assumption that countries announce their participation either simultaneously or sequentially. It is shown that a sequential formation process opens up possibilities for strategic behavior of countries...