We investigate the effects on health at birth of a shock generated by a major (25%) and unexpected wage cut austerity measure that affected all public sector employees in Romania in 2010. Our findings suggest an overall improvement in health at birth for boys exposed to the shock in early...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the Program for Pollution Control Evaluation and Rating (PROPER) in Indonesia. PROPER, the first major public disclosure program in the developing world, was launched in June 1995; though it collapsed in 1998 with the Asian financial crisis, it is currently...

We discuss the design of stated preference (SP) surveys in light of findings in behavioral economics such as context dependence of preferences, learning, and differences between revealed and normative preferences. More specifically, we discuss four different areas: (i) revealed and normative...

This paper analyzes the impacts of gender, as well as other author characteristics, on reviewers’ grading of papers submitted to an international conference in economics in Sweden in 2008. Correcting for other variables, including country and research field as well as researcher academic...

We use behavioral and experimental economics to study a particular aspect of the economics of climate change: the potential tradeoff between countries’ investments in mitigation versus adaptation. While mitigation of greenhouse gases can be viewed as a public good, adaptation to climate change...

I show that a simple formal model of reciprocal altruism is able to predict human behavior in contracting situations, puzzling when considered within selfishness assumption. For instance, motivation and performance crowding-out are explained by a signaling mechanism in which provision of an...

The con‡ict in Darfur has been described both as an ethnic cleansing campaign, carried out by the Sudanese government and its allied militias, and as a local struggle over dwindling natural resources between African farmers and Arab herders. In this paper, we construct a theoretical framework...

Adam Smith on language. Like most 18th century scholars, Adam Smith was not restricted to one field. One of his interests, besides economics, was language, which may partly be a consequence of his Scottish origin and the low standing of the Scottish dialect. Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and...

In permit trading systems, free initial allocation is common practice. A recent example is the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS). We investigate effects of different free allocation schemes on incentives and identify significant perverse effects on abatement and...

The transport sector is a major contributor to green house gas (GHG) emissions and its share is increasing. Biofuels may provide an option to replace fossil fuels and generate an increasing worldwide interest. Rich countries like the US and the European Union ha idies for domestic producers,...