The European sovereign debt crisis resulted in policies of fiscal austerity and economic downturn in Greece, marked by a prolonged period of recession and high unemployment. This article explores the social impact of the economic crisis, focusing on its effects on altruism using new...

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...

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a theoretical and empirical analysis of the nexus between long-term care insurance (LTCI), formal care, informal (family) care, and bequests. In our empirical analysis, we use micro data from the Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and...

Motivation represents a foundation corestone on which analyses in a number of the humanities and social sciences are built. For a long time, economists have seen motivation as connected with the act of giving, trying to interpret it in the context of the neoclassical economics assumptions. On...

Darwin’s (1871) observation that evolution has produced in us certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct that lack any obvious basis in individual utility is a useful springboard from which to clarify the role of emotion in moral judgment. The problem is whether a certain class of...

This paper develops an evolutionary approach to investigate whether revealing one's own emotions such as sel shness, altruism or envy has evolved in humans through a process of natural selection. This paper nds two results. First, if the revealing trait (revealing or hiding) and the...