I study to what extent voters are forward looking and how future income affects the voting decision. Particularly, I estimate the effect of both transitory and permanent income on preferences for different parties using a panel data set from the Norwegian Election Study. To construct a proxy for...

I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience. Voters then care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own group than the rest of the population. Within a model of political tax determination, both fractionalization and group antagonism reduce the support for...

I consider a society with heterogeneous individuals who can form organizations for the production of a differentiated service. An arrangement of organizations is said to be split up stable when there is no majority to split any of the organizations. Unlike other equilibrium concepts in the...

We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient. Although brokers contributed substantial amounts, nurses contributed significantly more, on average 76 percent of their endowment. In a...

In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

In public good games, voluntary contributions tend to start off high and decline as the game is repeated. If high contributors are matched, however, contributions tend to stay high. We propose a formalization predicting that high contributors will self-select into groups committed to charitable...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...