Besley and Ghatak (2001) show that public good should be owned by the agent who values the public good most — irrespective of technological factors. In this paper we relax their assumptions in a natural way by allowing the agents to be indispensable and show that relative valuations are not...

The siting of public facilities such as prisons or waste disposal facilities typically faces rejection by local populations (the "NIMBY" syndrome, for Not In My BackYard). These public goods exhibit a private bad aspect creating an asymmetry: all involved communities benefit from their...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of activism in determining the identity of the “green” median voter and the influence of the green voter on environmental regulatory stringency in the US states. Design/methodology/approach – Regulatory stringency is measured...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine what the significant contributions to the intergenerational equity and social discount rate (SDR) literature have been over recent decades and presents what policy progress has been made as a result. Design/methodology/approach The approach has...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze economically several versions of the philosophical common good in order to contribute to the search for a viable conceptualization of the common good. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents an economic analysis of the common good by...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on conditional cooperation and investigate whether the difference in contributions between Partners and Strangers designs in linear public goods experiments can be explained by differences in beliefs. Design/methodology/approach – The author...

Purpose – The study attempts to look into the poverty and deprivation in slums across various social and religious groups and its bearing on the children. It not only analyses income poverty but also looks at derivation of access to basic services including water, sanitation and drainage. The...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect ofmaking "others' behaviour" a controlled variable,but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute thepool of subjects. This paper proposes andimplements a new experimental design, the Conditional...

Why do people leave high-income countries with extensive welfare states? This article will examine what underlies the emigration intentions of native-born inhabitants of one industrialized country in particular: the Netherlands. To understand emigration from high-income countries we focus not...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9442.00182/abstract">'Journal of Economics'</A> 102(1) 23-39.<P>We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays arepeated public good game to astrangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations.Subjects in the partners...</p></a>