Across the globe, local governments have increasingly begun to rely on municipally owned corporations (MOCs) to provide public services, mounting to what scholars describe as a burgeoning corporatization in local government. Some studies have described this development as a rational response to...

Does corruption affect the incentives for potential entrepreneurs to start businesses? The traditional view holds that entrepreneurship is inhibited. However, a few recent studies indicate the contrary, supporting a "grease the wheels" perspective. In a novel approach to this question, we...

The cross-country correlation between social trust and income equality is well documented, but few studies examine the direction of causality. We show theoretically that by facilitating cooperation, trust may increase efficiency and lead to more equal outcomes, while the feedback from inequality...

This paper analyzes how the possibility to complement social income insurance schemes with private insurance affects the political support for social insurance. It is shown that political support for social insurance is weakly decreasing in the replacement rate. Policy makers seeking to maintain...

Using World Bank data on institutional quality and the KOF Globalization Index, we examine over 100 countries from 1992 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between economic and social globalization and six measures of institutional quality. Theoretically, the incentives of elites to respond to...

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. The results show that seemingly small differences in instructions induce fundamentally different perceptions regarding entitlement. Behavior is affected accordingly,...

This paper reports results from a classroom dictator game comparing the effects of three different sets of standard instructions. As was shown by Oxoby and Spraggon (2008), inducing a feeling of entitlement - one subject earning the endowment - strongly affects allocations in dictator games...

This paper asks to what extent life satisfaction among immigrants remains similar to that in their country of origin and to what extent it adapts to that in their country of residence. We employ data from 29,000 immigrants in the European Social Survey to estimate the relative importance of...

More than 50 years after independence, the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa remain poor with limited rates of economic growth. One of the most striking features of economic development on the sub-Saharan subcontinent is the remarkably poor performance of French colonies relative to...

Social trust is typically measured using surveys that ask people if they agree that most people can be trusted. A potential problem is that falling response rates plague these surveys. If nonresponses are systematic, comparisons of social trust over time will be biased. We examine social and...