A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet while the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through...

Among the oldest and most pervasive economic institutions are bonded labor and serfdom. While seemingly exploitative, both bonded labor and serfdom are often not imposed on the laborers but voluntarily chosen. It is generally the lack of suitable alternatives which makes workers opt for a life...

Among the oldest and most pervasive economic institutions are bonded labor and serfdom. While seemingly exploitative, both bonded labor and serfdom are often not imposed on the laborers but voluntarily chosen. It is generally the lack of suitable alternatives which makes workers opt for a life...

Although pension funds have gained importance in the last two decades, their role has not been described in detail by economic models. This paper focusses on the scope of these institutional investors when they are not satisfied with a management team of a company in which the pension fund holds...

We construct a general equilibrium model of a two-country trading block where governments through tax policies attract mobile capital, and provide an imported public consumption good. At Nash equilibrium, when the public good is under-provided, (i) a country with a large GDP, has a large Nash...

Since Olson's (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, the exploitation hypothesis, in which the rich shoulders the provision burden of public goods for the poor, has held sway despite empirical exceptions. To address such exceptions, we establish two alternative exploitation hypotheses based on...

Economic behavior often takes place in groups of small numbers of peopleinteracting with each other (like work teams, neighborhoods, socialnetworks, etc.). Characteristic of such interaction is the development of(affective) interpersonal relationships, or social ties. According tosociologists,...

We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays arepeated public good game to astrangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations.Subjects in the partners conditioncontribute from the first period on significantly more to the public good...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect ofmaking "others' behaviour" a controlled variable,but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute thepool of subjects. This paper proposes andimplements a new experimental design, the Conditional...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...