The willingness of individuals to enforce social norms can have important welfare implications. All the experimental evidence on norm enforcement so far comes from laboratory experiments and indicates that many participants are indeed willing to enforce norms, even in one-shot interactions. We...

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals’ behaviors...

Daylight savings time (DST) represents a public good with costs and benefits. We provide the first comprehensive examination of the welfare effects of the spring and autumn transitions for the UK and Germany. Using individual-level data and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the...

What motivates subjects in their decision making is a lingering issue in public goods experiments. Using a nonlinear payoff function and a two-subject model, we create a one-toone correspondence between contributions and motivations, enabling us to isolate and identify the following three...

This paper examines multinational public goods provision under multilateral income transfers and productivity differences across countries. We assume the existence of a planner who uses linear approximation for utility maximization for all countries. The main findings are: (i) A country is an...

In this paper we develop a novel approach to measuring individual welfare within households, recognizing that individuals may have both different preferences (particularly regarding public consumption) and differential access to resources. We construct a money metric measure of welfare that...

We examine whether and how the educational background of political leaders matters for policy choices and outcomes. Using data on municipalities in Brazil from 2000-2008, we estimate the effects of electing a more educated leader in a regression-discontinuity design whereby policy inputs and...

A continuación se presenta un documento de trabajoresultado de un proceso investigativo, cuyo principalobjetivo es demostrar la incidencia en el gasto de lasfamilias en relación con el transporte público en laslocalidades de Usme y Ciudad Bolívar de Bogotá desdeuna perspectiva analítica de...

La pérdida de importancia económica de la caficultura en Colombia, tanto en el contexto nacional como en el internacional, se explica, principalmente, por la caída dramática de su productividad; el consiguiente empobrecimiento de los caficultores, así como por el envejecimiento de estos y de...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of fiscal decentralization on Colombia's public basic education. Based on the social and economic data available for 1,003 municipalities and 13,670 public schools, for the last decade, we confirmed that decentralization has had a positive and...