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,...

This paper examines efficiency in the provision and utilization of a congestible public input in a symmetric tax competition framework with wage rigidities. Despite the fact that also lump-sum taxation is available for regional governments, second-best efficiency emerges only as a special case...

I analyze the effects of ethnic divisions on the provision of public goods. Using OpenStreetMap data, I construct a new global dataset of locations of public amenities, such as schools, hospital and libraries. I allow for the possibility that the data may be systematically incomplete using two...

We use an experiment to test the hypothesis that groups consisting of like-minded cooperators are able to cooperate irrespective of punishment and therefore have a lower demand for a costly punishment institution than groups of like-minded free riders, who are unable to cooperate without...

The Paris Agreement aims at limiting the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels. A key component of the agreement are "nationally determined contributions" (NDC). For this, non-state actors such as civil society groups, economic actors, and subnational...

In this paper we develop a dynamic model that explains the pattern of population and production allocation in an economy with an urban location and a rural one. Agglomeration economies make urban dwellers benefit from a larger population living in the city and urban firms become more productive...

We analyse free-riding behaviour of Finnish municipalities prior to voluntary municipal mergers. The merger process creates a temporary common pool problem, because of a delay from the initial decision to the actual merger during which municipalities stay autonomous. Using a...

Do voters value the quality of local public goods, such as whether pavements are clean, whether benches in the park need repair, or whether local roads are in good shape? Using almost 150,000 geo-located complaints that were posted on the complaint-platform FixMyStreet.com between 2007 and 2011,...