Abstract: Studies of political favouritism in Africa often treat ethnic and regional favouritism as interchangeable concepts. The present paper distinguishes between the two and investigates their relative influence in Sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on whether individuals perceive their ethnic...

Common identity and peer punishment have been identified as important means to reduce free riding and to promote cooperation in teamwork settings. This paper examines the relative importance of these two mechanisms, as well as the importance of income distribution in team cooperation. In a...

Using two alternative indicators of redistribution -social transfers and social spending- over the time-period 1880-1933 and using two alternative proxies for inequality -the percentage of non-family farms and the top income shares-, this paper shows that, contrary to what many studies on the...

We examine social preferences of Swedish and Austrian children and adolescents using the experimental design of Charness and Rabin (2002). We find that difference aversion decreases while social-welfare preferences increase with age.<p>

This paper examines whether the subjective well-being of migrants is responsive to fluc- tuations in macroeconomic conditions in their country of origin. Using the German Socio- Economic Panel for the years 1984 to 2009 and macroeconomic variables for 24 countries of origin, we exploit...

This paper uses data from a firm with team production to investigate the association between workers’ productivity, risk aversion and preferred bonus scheme (team or individual). The economic model makes a strong prediction in this case. Workers who produce more than the team average should...

Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is increasingly used as a way to measure individual wellbeing. Interpreted as "experienced utility", it has been compared to "decision utility" using specific experiments (Kahneman et al., 1997) or stated preferences(Benjamin et al. 2012). We suggest here an original...

In this paper, we defend the idea of the potential existence of equilibrium in personal income distribution in Germany. This concept can be motivated by two different approaches: One is a status theory put forward by Gerold Blümle, the other is a sort of hybrid variant of the prospect theory,...

Hypothetical bias in stated-preference methods appears sometimes to be very large, and other times non-existent. This is here largely explained by a model where people derive utility from a positive self-image associated with morally commendable behavior. The results of a choice experiment are...

We analyze optimal social discount rates when people derive utility from relative consumption. We compare the social, private, and conventional Ramsey rates. Assuming a positive growth rate, we find that 1) the social discount rate exceeds the private discount rate if the importance of relative...