How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

This paper tests empirically the strategic explanation of budget deficits suggested by Tabellini and Alesina [13] and Persson and Svensson [12]. Tabellini and Alesina suggest that governments with different political orientation provide different public goods. The model predicts that: a) public...

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters' preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability...

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters’ preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability...

We study a general equilibrium model with a non-profit firm producing a public good using private goods as inputs which are financed by voluntary contributions (subscriptions) of households. We analyze policy interventions that increase the public good level at subscription equilibria, and show...

According to Adam Smith (1790), human selfishness can be restrained by introspection. We test the effect of introspection on people’s willingness to cooperate in a public good game. Drawing on the concept of identity utility (George A. Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton, 2000), we show...

We experimentally investigate variants of the investment game by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995), in which one of the two players decides who are first mover and second mover. It has been shown by Kleine, Königstein, and Rozsnyói (2014) that voluntary leadership increases both investment and...

We report experimental findings on the role of charitable promises in bargaining settings. We vary the enforceability of such promises within variants of ultimatum games where the proposer suggest a split between himself, the responder and a char-itable donation. By reneging on initial pledges,...

We introduce public capital and public services as inputs in an endogenous growth model. We show that the growth rate depends on the apportionment of tax revenues between the accumulation of public capital and the provision of public services. When public spending is financed by proportional...

Policies and explicit private incentives designed for self-regarding individuals sometimes are less effective or even counterproductive when they diminish altruism, ethical norms and other social preferences. Evidence from 51 experimental studies indicates that this crowding out effect is...