How to ban the fraudulent use of performance-enhancing drugs is an issue in all professional - and increasingly in amateur - sports. The main effort in enforcing a “clean sport” has concentrated on proving an abuse of performance-enhancing drugs and on imposing sanctions on teams and...

Conventional wisdom has it that economic training and education tends to produce less cooperative people – where cooperation means following group-oriented goals. This issue has attracted particular attention in discussions of the current economic crisis where it was asked if increasing...

Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the...

Any cooperation that profits from relation-specific investments suffers from the well-known hold-up problem. If investments are not enforceable by an outside authority, the gains fall prey to individual opportunism caused by a free-rider problem. If, in addition, individual investments exhibit...

The information quality of mandatory financial reporting depends on two factors: (1) Are standards appropriate to produce financial statements that provide investors with sufficient information? (2) Is compliance to standards enforced by appropriate institutions? This paper addresses the...

Male and female social roles are largely predicated on the fact that male and female reproductive functions are separated in different individuals. This paper asks why gonochorism rather than hermaphroditism, is the rule among vertebrates. We argue that hermaphroditism may be unstable in the...

Why are we not hermaphrodites? This paper argues that while hermaphroditism is an e±cient means by which genes may propagate themselves, inherent tendencies towards polygyny undermine its stabil- ity. Understanding the forces that have established a segregation of sex functions between male and...

Classical household theory predicts that adolescents facing a developed labour market should invest in formal education. In contrast, it is obvious that adolescents in subsistence economies should choose learning-by-doing approaches to working on the family farm. However, it is unclear what...

Having a child out of wedlock used to be associated with shame and scorn. This is mostly not the case any more in the western world. Therefore, freed from social sanctions, single motherhood has become an additional family-choice alternative for women, along with marriage and childlessness. Yet,...