The economic impact of an institutional transplant depends on the underlying cultural environment of the receiving country. This paper provides the first evidence that the positive effect of importing good institutions cancels out when the receiving territories are characterized by cultural...

At the beginning of the 18th century, Sweden was an imperial power that had just sustained a century of modest economic growth. In 1800, Sweden's empire was gone, after a series of military defeats. Real GDP per capita had fallen to the same level as the early 1600s. In other words, the 18th...

This paper combines an economic experiment with survey data to investigate determinants of trust and trustworthiness in the Dutch society. We contrast the inferences which can be made on the trust propensity using stated and revealed measures and we test for participation bias in our experiment....

This paper analyzes data for a random sample drawn from the Dutch population who reveal their propensity to invest and reward investments in building up social capital by means of an economic experiment. We find substantial heterogeneity in the propensity to invest and in the propensity to...

A growing economic literature stresses the importance of relative comparisons, e.g., for savings and consumption or happiness. In this literature it is usually assumed that reference standards against which people compare themselves are exogenously given. In contrast findings from social...

The paper extends the standard tax evasion model by allowing for social interactions. In Manski?s (1993) nomenclature, our model takes into account social conformity effects (i.e., endogenous interactions), fairness effects (i.e., exogenous interactions) and sorting effects (i.e., correlated...

We present an economic experiment on network formation, in which subjects can decide to form links to one another. Direct links are costly but being connected is valuable. The gametheoretic basis for our experiment is the model of Bala and Goyal (2000). They distinguish between two scenarios...

This paper introduces a two-sided methodological framework for studies on cooperation based on a new game design. Presented games are continuous prisoner's dilemma games with positive and negative presentations of an identically structured decision problem. Decision makers can choose an...

We define social reciprocity as the act of demonstrating one's disapproval, at some personal cost, for the violation of widely-held norms (e.g., don't free ride). Social reciprocity differs from standard notions of reciprocity because social reciprocators intervene whenever a norm is violated...

To investigate the external validity of Ultimatum and Dictator game behavior we conduct experiments in field settings with naturally occurring variation in "social framing." Our participants are students at Middlebury College, non-traditional students at Kansas City Kansas Community College...