Changes in political boundaries aimed at devolving power to local governments are common in many countries. We examine the economic consequences of redistricting through the creation of smaller government units. Exploiting reforms that led to sharp variations in the number of government units in...

The provision of public goods in developing countries is a central challenge. This paper studies a model where each agent's effort provides heterogeneous benefits to the others, inducing a network of opportunities for favor-trading. We focus on a classical efficient benchmark – the Lindahl...

Changes in political boundaries aimed at devolving power to local governments are common in many countries. We examine the economic consequences of redistricting through the creation of smaller government units. Exploiting reforms that led to sharp variations in the number of government units in...

Early in their formation, modern nation-states face internal conflicts that impede their economic development. This paper examines the role of national identity in helping modern states overcome such conflicts to provide public goods and grow. We develop a model in which the population can...

In this paper, we analyze the long run economic performance of a small economy open to foreign investments. Policy instruments used to attract investments are taxes and attractive public infrastructures, whereas the policy choices of the rest of the world are taken as given. Applying the...

Early in their formation, modern nation-states face internal conflicts that impede their economic development. This paper examines the role of national identity in helping modern states overcome such conflicts to provide public goods and grow. We develop a model in which the population can...

We show in a public goods experiment on three continents that conditional cooperation is a universal behavioral regularity. Yet, the number of conditional cooperators and the extent of conditional cooperation are much higher in the U.S.A. than anywhere else.

This paper studies the effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntary contribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences of five rounds of a twoperson public good game in partner design. At the end of each sequence, subjects can select a new partner out of six...

Personality questionnaires have been used and can be used to predict behavior in economic settings. Using two sets of state-of-the-art measures from personality psychology (the Big Six) and social psychology (Social Value Orientation), we find that the behavior of men is predictable in the first...

We present a simple two-steps procedure for a within-subject test of the inequity aversion model of Fehr and Schmidt (1999). In the first step, subjects played modified ultimatum and dictator games and were classified according to their preferences. In the second step, subjects with specific...