Intergenerational altruism and contemporaneous cooperation are both important to the provision of long-lived public goods. Equilibrium climate protection may depend more sensitively on either of these considerations, depending on the type of policy rule one examines. This conclusion is based on...

We analyze the role of "the" utility discount rate and its implications to generation-specific and societal altruism and egoism, respectively, in a neoclassical framework. It is worked out clearly, that two different utility discount rates have to be distinguished: An (inverse)...

Family businesses make up forty percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the US, generate about two-thirds of the German GDP, employ about one-half of the labor force in Britain, and account for the majority of the private economies in developing countries. This paper develops a theory of family...

The future effects of climate change may induce increased intergenerational altruism. But will increased intergenerational altruism reduce the threat of climate change? In this chapter we investigate this question. In a second-best setting with insufficient control of greenhouse gas emissions in...

Previous work on the effects of private income transfers has been confined to intra-family interactions. One implication of this work is that such transfers benefit recipients by insuring against labor market risks. Allowing for equilibrium labor market responses, however, one would expect the...

Previous work on the effects of private income transfers has been confined to intra-family interactions. One implication of this work is that such transfers benefit recipients by insuring against labor market risks. Allowing for equilibrium labor market responses, however, one would expect the...

Recognizing that individualism, or weak family ties, may be favorable to economic development, we ask how family ties interact with climate to determine individual behavior and whether there is reason to believe that the strength of family ties evolves differently in different climates. For this...

This paper considers one altruistic developed country and several heterogeneous developing countries. We demonstrate that the lack of coordination between countries in tackling climate change finds an optimal solution if developing countries can expect to receive development aid transfers from...

We study a credence goods problem - that is, a moral hazard problem with non-contractible outcome - where altruistic experts (the agents) care both about their income and the utility of consumers (the principals). Experts' preferences over income and their consumers' utility are convex, such...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...