Douglass North gehört zu den führenden Sozialwissenschaftlern des 20. Jahrhunderts.Er wurde für seine bahnbrechenden Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der ökonomischenGeschichtstheorie mit dem Nobelpreis ausgezeichnet. Dieser Aufsatz rekonstruiert (a)seine kliometrische Diagnose der Moderne, (b)...

We consider a median voter model with uncertainty about how theeconomy functions. The distribution of income is exogenously given andthe provision of a public good is ¯nanced through a proportional tax.Voters and politicians do not know the true production function for thepublic good, but by...

The proportion of U.S. high school students working during the school year ranges from 23% in thefreshman year to 75% in the senior year. This study estimates how cumulative work histories duringthe high school years affect probability of dropout, high school academic performance, and...

Several countries have recently abolished or significantly reduced their taxes on bequests.Bequest taxes, on the other hand, were among the first to be introduced when modernsystems of taxation were developed at the end of the nineteenth century. We propose anexplanation for these facts which is...

This paper analyzes data from a novel field experiment designed to test the impact of twodifferent insurance products and a secret saving device on solidarity in risk-sharing groupsamong rural villagers in the Philippines. Risk is simulated by a lottery. Risk-sharing ispossible in solidarity...

This paper investigates the relationship between a CEO’s social network, firm identity, andfirm performance. There are two competing theories that predict contradictory outcomes.Following social network theory, one would expect a positive relation between social networksand firm performance,...

Most research in economics models agents somehow motivated by out-comes. Here, we model agents motivated by procedures instead, whereprocedures are dened independently of an outcome. To that end, wedesign procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry thesame information on other's...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...