The main goal of this study is two-fold: (1) to provide a general overview of thecontributions to the literature on the informal sector, with a special focus on the PublicChoice approach; and (2) to compare these contributions across two institutionallydifferent types of countries: developed and...

Performance ranking is common across a range of professional and recreational domains. Even when it has no economic consequences but does order people in terms of their social standing, anticipating such performance ranking may impact how people feel and perform. We examined this possibility by...

Competition involves two dimensions, rivalry for resources and social-status ranking. In our experiment we exclude the first dimension and investigate gender differences in the preference for status ranking. Participants perform a task under non-rivalry incentives. Before doing so, individuals...

We study the politico-economic interaction in a country in transition from a communist regime to a democratic, free market system, to wit, Albania. It is argued that the politicoeconomic system there is characterized by the existence of clans. Both the communists and the first democratically...

A series of experiments in Albania and the Netherlands give us the opportunity to compare behavioral patterns related to tax evasion. Subjects have to decide between a random 'registered' income, the realization of which will be known to the experimenter for sure, and a random 'unregistered'...

Empirically identifying the causal effect of social networks on migrants' economic prospects is a challenging task due to the non-random residential sorting of migrants into locations with greater opportunities for (previous) connections. Our study addresses this selection-bias issue by using a...

Performance ranking is common across a range of professional and recreational domains. Even when it has no economic consequences but does order people in terms of their social standing, anticipating such performance ranking may impact how people feel and perform. We examined this possibility by...

Competition involves two dimensions, rivalry for resources and social-status ranking. In our experiment we exclude the first dimension and investigate gender differences in the preference for status ranking. Participants perform a task under non-rivalry incentives. Before doing so, individuals...

Empirically identifying the causal effect of social networks on migrants' economic prospects is a challenging task due to the non-random residential sorting of migrants into locations with greater opportunities for (previous) connections. Our study addresses this selection-bias issue by using a...