This paper considers the potential impact of welfare benefits on the partnership status of women in the UK. Using recent policy reforms to identify the response rate I find that a £100/week welfare benefit "partnership penalty" reduces the probability of a woman having a partner by seven...

This is the first study that assesses the economic effects of direct democratic institutions on a cross country basis. Its results are based on up to six new measures produced to reflect the legislative basis for using direct democratic institutions as well as their factual use. In addition, a...

The passage of Title IX, the 1972 Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act, expanded high school athletic opportunities to include girls, revolutionizing mass sports participation in the United States. This paper analyzes high school athletic participation in the United States and how sports...

This paper analyses the effect of federalism on fertility and growth. In a model with human capital accumulation and endogenous fertility, two regimes of education finance are compared: central and local education. Using numerical simulation, I find that local education finance yields higher...

We study the interplay of inequality and trust in a dynamic game, in which trust increases efficiency and thus allows higher growth of the experimental economy in the future. We find that trust is initially high in a treatment starting with equal endowments, but decreases over time. In a...

We analyze the stock price impact of firms' U.S. cross-listing on home-market rival firms. Using an empirical event study approach we find negative cumulative average abnormal returns for the rival firms. The evidence suggests that the dominant effect is that investors see rivals as at a...

This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on labour market performance. We analyse as an indicator for the labour intensity of output growth the employment threshold (the minimum growth rate of output necessary to keep employment constant). We show for a sample of 17 OECD...

We adopt a spatial econometric approach to estimate intra- and inter-industry productivity spillovers in total factor productivity transmitted through input-output relations in a sample of 13 OECD countries and 15 manufacturing industries. Both R&D spillovers as well as remainder,...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions in which commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure each other through both formal contracts and...