Governments in Latin America raise little revenue from property taxation, despite arguments for its efficiency and equity. Adequate registry information would support consistent collection, but registries are costly to establish and maintain. Compared to tax collection, field experimental...

As addressing climate change becomes a high priority it seems likely that there will be a surge in interest in deploying nuclear power. Other fuel bases are too dirty (coal), too expensive (oil, natural gas) or too speculative (solar, wind) to completely supply the energy needs of the global...

The use of coarse categories is prevalent in various situations and has been linked to biased economic outcomes, ranging from discrimination against minorities to empirical anomalies in financial markets. In this paper we study economic rationales for categorizing coarsely. We think of the way...

I examine a setting, where an information sender conducts research into a payoff-relevant state variable, and releases information to agents, who consider joining a coalition. The agents' actions can cause harm by contributing to a public bad. The sender, who has commitment power, by designing...

With complementary Chinese data sets and alternative corruption measures, we explore the consequences of corruption. Adopting a novel approach we provide evidence that corruption can have both, positive and negative effects, on economic development. The overall impact of corruption might be the...

In this study we explore in detail the causes of corruption in China using two different sets of data at the regional level (provinces and cities). We observe that regions with more anti-corruption efforts, histories of British rule, higher openness, more access to media and relatively higher...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

We estimate the causal effect of mandatory participation in the military service on the involvement in criminal activities. We exploit the random assignment of young men to military service in Argentina through a draft lottery to identify this causal effect. Using a unique set of administrative...