Does socioeconomic background when measured by parental educational attainment explain the heterogeneity in adults' other-regarding preferences? I test this by using data from two online experiments -- a Dictator Game and a Trust Game that were conducted with a broad sample of the Danish adult...

We interview both parents and their children enrolled in six primary schools in the district of Treviso (Italy). We study the structural differences between the children network of friends reported by children and the one elicited asking their parents. We find that the parents’ network has a...

Evidence for the OECD countries show that the “great ratios”, such as the unemployment rate, factor shares, Tobin’s q and the investment-capital ratio, fluctuate significantly on medium-term frequencies of 10-40 years duration. To explain these medium-term fluctuations, we establish a...

Partisan voters are optimistic about electoral outcomes: their estimates of the probability of electoral success for their party or candidate are substantially higher than the average among the electorate. This has large potential implications for political bargaining. Optimism about future...

Evidence from economics, anthropology and biology testifies to a fundamental trade-off between the number of offspring (quantity) and amount of nutrition per child (quality). This leads to a theory of pre-industrial growth where body size as well as population size is endogenous. But when...

The Forward Search Algorithm is a statistical algorithm for obtaining robust estimators of regression coefficients in the presence of outliers. The algorithm selects a succession of subsets of observations from which the parameters are estimated. The present note shows how the theory of...

We present a dynamic extension of the classic static model of Bertrand price competition that allows competing duopolists to undertake cost-reducing investments in an attempt to “leapfrog” their rival to attain low-cost leadership—at least temporarily. We show that leapfrogging occurs in...

We propose novel misspecification tests of semiparametric and fully parametric univariate diffusion models based on the estimators developed in Kristensen (Journal of Econometrics, 2010). We first demonstrate that given a preliminary estimator of either the drift or the diffusion term in a...

The paper studies in a simple, Downsian model of political competition how the private provision of public goods is affected when it is embedded in a system of democracy and redistributive taxation. Results show that the positive effect of inequality on public goods production, which Olson...

This paper, which is prepared for the Inagural Conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in King's College, Cambridge, 8-11 April 2010, questions the preeminence of theory over empirics in economics and argues that empirical econometrics needs to be given a more important and inde-...