Since 1958 the hukou (household registration) system has assigned Chinese citizens either a rural or urban status. Some studies argue that the rural-to-urban migrants in China who do not have urban hukou are not entitled to urban social insurance schemes, due to institutional discrimination,...

In a recent paper in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Croson (2000) shows that when subjects' beliefs about the contributions of others are elicited in a voluntary contributions public goods game, those subjects contribute less than do other subjects in the same game when beliefs...

We report results from a multi-period game designed to stimulate feelings of envy. There are a number of important features of our game that distinguish it from previous games used to examine envy. A unique and important feature of our design is that it addresses the two negative effects of...

We study communication networks where the strength of the direct link between any pair of agents is a concave function of their investments towards each other. We show that the symmetric complete network can be Nash stable and dominate the star architecture in terms of total utility.

We demonstrate that existing differences in financial development between countries can be explained by the cumulative variations in their levels of state experience since 1 AD. This dimension of early historical development has not been considered so far in studies that analyze the determinants...

This paper reports results from a field study comparing the effects of rebates and matching subsidies for charitable contributions. The study was conducted in conjunction with Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota, a religiously affiliated social services charity. The field experiment has three...

Private grazing fees differ substantially and systematically across states in the West. In contrast, federal policy establishes the same grazing fee on federal lands, regardless of location. We analyze locational differences in private grazing fees with an econometric model. Differences in...

Models of social preferences (i.e. inequality aversion), assuming society is defined by a hierarchy based on income or wealth, predict that the poor envy the rich. Reference Group Theory predicts that the poor (rich) envy others from the same social group or class. We report results from a game...

The functioning and well-being of any society and organization critically hinges on norms of cooperation that regulate social activities. Empirical evidence on how such norms emerge and in which environments they thrive remain a clear void in the literature. To provide an initial set of...