The literature on nation-building and nationalism suggests that nation-building affects economic and political performance, mitigates the problems associated with ethnic hetero- geneity, but that nationalism, an indicator of successful nation-building, is linked to dismal performance via...

The use of institutional measures in empirical work is widespread, but the question of what these measures actually capture and how they are constructed is something that is not given enough attention. Institutions and their measures are therefore like a “black box of goodies”: Something...

The political and economic impact of country size has been a frequently discussed issue in social science. In accordance with the general hypothesis of Montesquieu, this paper demonstrates that there is a robust negative relationship between the size of country territory and a measure of the...

A growing literature in economics examines the development of preferences among children and adolescents. We combine a repeated dictator game with treatments that either provides participants with information about the average behavior of others or not. In a sample of 384 children aged 5-17, we...

We measure people’s prosocial behavior, in terms of voluntary money and labor time contributions to an archetypical public good, a bridge, and in terms of voluntary money contributions in a public good game, using the same non-student sample in rural Vietnam at four different points in time...

In this paper we use laboratory experiments to test the theoretical predictions derived by Villegas-Palacio and Coria (2010) about the effects of the interaction between technology adoption and incomplete enforcement. They show that under Tradable Emissions Permits (TEPs), and in contrast to...

Aggregate shocks in demand such as the burst of the 2001 dot-com bubble affect firms’ behavior and, therefore, the market structure. This paper proposes a fully dynamic oligopoly model to evaluate the impact of aggregate demand shocks on entry and exit costs as well as on investment and labor...

All since the rise of the first civilizations, economic development has been closely intertwined with the evolution of states. In this paper, we contribute to the literature on state history and long-run economic development in four ways. First, we extend and complete the state history index...

http://hdl.handle.net/2077/32052 While it is widely believed that regions which experienced a transition to Neolithic agriculture early also become institutionally and conomically more advanced, many indicators suggest that within the Western agricultural core (including Europe, North Africa,...

One potential reason for bubbles evolving prior to the financial crisis was excessive risk taking stemming from option-like incentive schemes in financial institutions. By running laboratory asset markets, we investigate the impact of option-like incentives on price formation and trading...