This paper concentrates on international fiscal competition for internationally mobile direct investment. We differentiate between multinational enterprises whose direct investments are internationally mobile and domestic enterprises whose investment activities are limited to their country of...

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important in the use of carbon offsets as part of climate change mitigation....

We examine the effect of immigration on public spending from a theoretical (political economic) and an empirical perspective. We distinguish between public spending on private goods and on public goods. Our model implies that whether immigration increases or decreases public spending primarily...

Because costly punishment is not credible, subgame perfection suggests that punishment will not deter free riding, regardless of the size or structure of groups. However, experiments show that people will punish free riders, even at considerable cost. To examine the implications of agents who...

Field evidence suggests that people belonging to the same group often behave similarly, i.e., behaviour exhibits social interaction effects. We conduct an experiment that avoids the identification problem present in the field. Our novel design feature is that each subject simultaneously is a...

Many public goods like dams, fire departments, and lighthouses do not provide direct utility but act more as insurance devices against floods, fire, and shipwreck. They either diminish the probability or the size of the loss. We extend the public good model with this insurance aspect and...

We adopt an inter-generational approach to the public goods game where at the end of each session subjects are allowed to leave advice for the succeeding generation via free form messages. We find that a process of social learning via passing advice from one generation to the next helps increase...

We study a public goods game where subjects get feedback either continually or intermittently. We find that the intermittent feedback helps to mitigate problems of free riding because subjects in this treatment focus more on a string of choices rather than deciding on a case by case basis as in...