Entrusting the power to punish to a central authority is a hallmark of civilization. We study a collective action dilemma in which self-interest should produce a sub-optimal outcome absent sanctions for non-cooperation. We then test experimentally whether subjects make the theoretically optimal...

We advance the hypothesis that cultural values such as high work ethic and thrift, “the Protestant ethic” according to Max Weber, may have been diffused long before the Reformation, thereby importantly affecting the pre-industrial growth record. The source of pre-Reformation Protestant...

We find that cognitive abilities, educational attainment, and some personality traits indirectly affect ideological preferences through changes in income. The effects of changes in personality traits on ideology directly and indirectly through income are in the same direction. However, the...

What are the welfare effects of a policy that facilitates for insurance customers to privately and covertly learn about their accident risks? We endogenize the information structure in Stiglitz's classic monopoly insurance model. We first show that his results are robust: For a small information...

We show that there is a unique correlated equilibrium, identical to the unique Nash equilibrium, in the classic Bertrand oligopoly model with homogenous goods. This provides a theoretical underpinning for the so-called "Bertrand paradox" and also generalizes earlier results on mixed-strategy...

We investigate experimentally the effects of corrupt experts on information aggregation in committees. We find that non-experts are significantly less likely to delegate through abstention when there is a probability that experts are corrupt. Such decreased abstention, when the probability of...

In a laboratory experiment designed to capture key aspects of the interaction between physicians and patients in a stylized way, we study the effects of medical insurance and competition in the guise of free choice of physician. Medical treatment is an example of a credence good: only the...

This paper addresses two issues. It documents the changes in the publication strategy of the members of the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen over the last 50 years, away from a broad domestic audience to the international community of peers and scholars. From having been only...

Consumers have bounded perception and treat similar goods as homogeneous. The interaction between this bias and the structure of firms is studied in a vertically differentiated duopoly with market entry. With fixed costs of quality, natural monopoly and entry deterrence occurs at lower entry...

We derive the optimal hedging ratios for a portfolio of assets driven by a Cointegrated Vector Autoregressive model (CVAR) with general cointegration rank. Our hedge is optimal in the sense of minimum variance portfolio. We consider a model that allows for the hedges to be cointegrated with the...