We experimentally investigate cooperation within a finitely repeated public goods game framework where peer punishment is possible but, unlike previous work, in each round access to sanctioning power is exclusively awarded to the group’s top contributor. We compare this mechanism with a...

Climate change scenarios predict an increase of extreme rain events, which will increase the risk of wastewater flooding and of missing legal water quality targets. This study elicits the willingness to pay to reduce ecological and health risks from combined sewer overflows in rivers and lakes,...

The European Council of 8 February 2013, with its decision to cut the EU budget to 1% of GDP, made a great mistake: it aggravated the recession of the European economy and, tacitly, admitted that a European recovery policy is impossible. In this paper the Authors show that with an annual EU...

What are the individual characteristics that predict unethical behavior? To answer this question we randomly interviewed 541 passengers who used the bus in Reggio Emilia (Italy). Exploiting the high level of fare evasion (43% without a valid ticket) we find that young, male and non-Caucasian...

This paper compares dierent centralized collective models for maximizing the utility of a household from the point of view of the single members that compose it. We describe the collective maximization program as a vector optimization problem and analyze the household welfare and Pareto...

The widening of global current account balances has been an important subject of academic debate in recent years. Several authors have pointed out that there has been a direct link between the world financial crisis in 2007/ 09 and the so called euro crisis since 2010. Structural imbalances,...

We study the effect of alternative parental teaching strategies on the propensity to save and the amount saved during adulthood. Using a panel dataset from the Dutch DNB Household Survey we find that parental teaching to save increases the likelihood that an adult will save by 16%, and the...

We build an agent-based model to study how the interplay between low- and high-frequency trading affects asset price dynamics. Our main goal is to investigate whether high-frequency trading exacerbates market volatility and generates flash crashes. In the model, low-frequency agents adopt...

We evaluate the effect of the 1989 shock over economic development in four Eastern European countries. We apply a counterfactual approach and define the shock alternatively as the trigger for economic openness, political competition, or both. The main result is an effect of economic freedom...