Non-linear relationships are common in economic theory, and such relationships are also frequently tested empirically. We argue that the usual test of non-linear relationships is flawed, and derive the appropriate test for a U shaped relationship. Our test gives the exact necessary and...

I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience. Voters then care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own group than the rest of the population. Within a model of political tax determination, both fractionalization and group antagonism reduce the support for...

I consider a society with heterogeneous individuals who can form organizations for the production of a differentiated service. An arrangement of organizations is said to be split up stable when there is no majority to split any of the organizations. Unlike other equilibrium concepts in the...

We report results from a dictator game experiment with nurse students and real estate broker students as dictators, and Amnesty International as the recipient. Although brokers contributed substantial amounts, nurses contributed significantly more, on average 76 percent of their endowment. In a...

In democratic societies with skewed income distributions, simple political economy models predict that the poor will form a coalition to implement high taxes. I review this basic theory and some of its extensions. Then I discuss how we can test the model, and some common pitfalls, before I...

In public good games, voluntary contributions tend to start o 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 selfselect into groups committed to charitable...

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 time series nature of repeated surveys is seldom taken into account. I present a statistical model of repeated surveys and construct a computationally feasible estimator based on the Kalman filter. The novelty is that the estimator efficiently uses the whole underlying data set. However, for...

A common approach to defining equivalence scales is to consider a household modelled as if it maximizes a single utility function. This may be founded on an assumption of the household maximizing a welfare function of individual utilities. For a positive analysis of the household, this may be...

To explain the rise in Afghan opium production, we explore how rising conflicts change the incentives of farmers. Conflicts make illegal opportunities more profitable as they increase the perceived lawlessness and destroy infrastructure crucial to alternative crops. Exploiting a unique data set,...