The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support the provision of public goods has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable of either resolving or...

I discuss correlations between the historical growth of social capabilities and patterns of economic growth across world regions since the industrial revolution and especially in recent decades. Based on this analysis, I argue that the apparent relationship between institutions and economic...

We introduce new treatments of a voluntary contribution mechanism with opportunities to punish in order to see how contributions, punishments and earnings change when punishment is in the form of fines the punisher distributes to other members of her group. The linked punishment-reward set up is...

This book is a detailed study of rural reform in China. After the death of Mao, and with the ascendency of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China began a programme of agricultural reform intended to increase productivity. Three major changes moved the agricultural sector from a centrally planned system to...

This paper surveys the evidence, theoretical and empirical, relating to the possibility of achieving more egalitarian distributions of income than are typical in modern societies. The first four parts of the paper (Introduction, Improving efficiency an equality, The ownership of firms, and...

We use two types of cross-country growth regression models to revisit explanations of slow growth in Africa looking at growth rate variation among African countries only. Both sets of models produce results that are surprising given conclusions based on global sample: within Africa, we find a...

We invited “residents” of a virtual world who vary in real-world age and occupation to play a trust game with stakes comparable to “in world” wages. In different treatments, the lab wall was adorned with an emotively suggestive photograph, a suggestive text was added to the instructions,...

A novel experiment is used to show that the effect of a policy on the level of cooperation is greater when it is chosen democratically by the subjects than when it is exogenously imposed. In contrast to the previous literature, our experimental design allows us to control for selection effects...

We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using the matrix to adjust indicators of early development so that they reflect the history of a population's ancestors rather than...