High levels of social trust has been linked to both public sector size and long term economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries are able to combine high taxes and relatively high levels of economic growth. This paper examines if social trust as a background factor also...

The sharing economy (peer-to-peer based sharing or renting activities coordinated through community-based online services) is typically assumed to be closely related to social trust. The two sharing economy companies Airbnb and Flipkey exist in over 100 countries, allowing us to construct a...

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes, but the causality between trust and institutions is debated. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates (surveyed in the SOM Institute's Swedish Expatriate Survey 2014), we use variation in time...

Private universities, as opposed to publicly financed ones, are dominant in some countries and almost non-existent in others. We develop a dynamic model to demonstrate that private providers emerge as soon as they can profitably sell an elite signal to the most highly talented. As private...

The standard method when analyzing the problem of cooperation using evolutionary game theory is to assume that people are randomly matched against each other in repeated games. In this paper we discuss the implications of allowing agents to have preferences over possible opponents. We model...

We analyze a cooperation game in an evolutionary environment. Agents make noisy observations of opponents' propensity to cooperate, called reputation, and form preferences over opponents based on their reputation. A game takes place when two agents agree to play. Pareto optimal cooperation is...

Using the newly developed KOF-index of globalization, as well as the economic freedom index from the Fraser institute, we examine if globalization and economic liberalizations are linked to increases in income inequality within countries. Studying changes between 1980 and 2000, we find a...

Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...

This paper analyzes the relation between three dimensions of globalization (economic, social and political) and life expectancy using a panel of 92 countries over the period 1970-2005. Using different estimation techniques and sample groupings we find a very robust positive effect from economic...

We use the Economic Freedom Index (Gwartney, Lawson and Norton 2008) to characterise the institutions of ancient Athens in the fourth century BCE. It has been shown that ancient Greece witness improved living conditions for an extended period of time. Athens in the classical period appears to...