In order to collect the revenue necessary to fund public goods, states are often required to both deter tax evasion and encourage voluntary tax compliance on the part of their citizens. While most prior research has focused on explaining tax evasion with standard economic model parameters, there...

Objective: There has been a growing interest in the relationship between culture and crime in recent years, but there is little research investigating the role of religion. To clarify this empirical cleavage, we propose a Durkheimian model of the countervailing effects of religion on violent...

Evidence for the long-term effects of foreign aid on local communities is mixed. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate whether external subsidies, e.g. foreign assistance, promote or undermine giving. Subjects play two rounds of a dictator game followed by an elicitation of norms. In both...

Recent theory predicts that climatic demands in conjunction with wealth-based resources serve to enhance socio-psychological functioning and facilitate the development of cognitive processes such as generalized trust. Past research, however, has provided only cross-sectional evidence to support...

Sociologists, political scientists, and economists all suggest that culture plays a pivotal role in the development of large-scale cooperation. In this study, I used generalized trust as a measure of culture to explore if and how culture impacts intentional homicide, my operationalization of...

This article draws from an ongoing debate over explanations of homicide. Within this debate, we investigate the pro-social effects of civil society and social capital. Few cross-national studies explore whether elements of social capital either increase or decrease homicide. The cross-national...

The Stranger-Face Trust (SFT) questionnaire and the Imaginary Stranger Trust (IST) questionnaire are two new self-report measures of generalized trust that assess trust in real (SFT) and imaginary (IST) strangers across four trust domains. Both were designed to be objective, empirically valid,...