Agricultural and rural development policies have had and have a great influence in developing areas over others, by intensifying the use of land and the abandonment of others, with effect on exodus of rural population to urban areas, soil erosion, the continued decline of many species and...

We examine debt-sensitive majority rules. According to such a rule, the higher a planned public debt, the higher the necessary parliamentary majority to approve it. In a two-period model, we compare debt-sensitive majority rules with the simple majority rule when individuals differ regarding...

Latent payback is a natural element of social interactions: Non-cooperators face substantial threats of not being supported in situations of dire need, or of being punished in seemingly unrelated situations. In the controlled environment of the laboratory, we experimentally explore the effects...

The assessment that the implementation of efficient outcomes by means of decentralized spontaneous solutions is to be expected for private goods, but not for public goods has become part of the conventional wisdom of our discipline. This paper uses a mechanism design approach to clarify under...

The provision of public goods often relies on voluntary contributions and cooperation. While most of the experimental literature focuses on individual contributions, many real-world problems involve the formation of institutions among subgroups (coalitions) of players. International agreements...

The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers and that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results, however,...

While many studies explored impacts of political quotas for females, often with ambiguous results, underlying mechanisms and long-term effects have received relatively little attention. Nation-wide data from India spanning a 15-year period allow us to explore how reservations affect leader...

We analyze the interplay of group identity and inter-group conflict in a contest where each of two conflicting groups can develop either a group or an individualistic identity. Contest structures impact on the adoption of identities which themselves influence behavior in the contest. We show the...

We present a non-cooperative model of a family's time allocation between work and a home-produced public good, and examine whether the income tax should apply to couples or individuals. While tax-induced labor supply distortions lead to overprovision of the public good, spouses' failure to...

Social preferences for the punishment of free riders are critical for generating cooperative behavior in human society. Focusing on the receiving fees of Japan´s public broadcaster, this study analyses how punishment of free riders, that is, the strengthening of legal responses against them,...