Over the last couple of decades, it has become a commonplace to claim that institutions matterʺ for economic development. Yet, institutions are not exogenous but the result of hu-man action. It is argued here that the values and norms held by substantial parts of society’s members are an...

Over the last couple of decades, it has become a commonplace to claim that institutions matter" for economic development. Yet, institutions are not exogenous but the result of hu-man action. It is argued here that the values and norms held by substantial parts of society’s members are an...

Over the last couple of decades, it has become a commonplace to claim that “institutions matter” for economic development. Yet, institutions are not exogenous but the result of hu-man action. It is argued here that the values and norms held by substantial parts of society’s members are an...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...

The aim of the paper is to analyze how corruption contributes to the spread of shadow economy and damages viable economic development of any country. The unfreedoms that are created under the conditions of illegal transactions and corrupt practices considerably limit the opportunities of...

This paper presents evidence that "social capital" matters for measurable economic performance, using indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Values Surveys for a sample of 29 market economies. Memberships in formal groups--Putnam's measure of social capital--is not associated with...

The idea that people follow trust norms when making trust decisions is developed in an evolutionary model of adaptive play by boundedly rational agents. Because it neither implies nor is it implied by cooperation, trust is not modelled as cooperation in a Prisoners' Dilemma but as a coordination...

We ran experiments with a stag hunt and bargaining coordination game. Using a between-subjects design, we varied the identity of the opponent between someone of the same culture or a different culture. The idea was to see whether cultural norms or identity played a part in coordination...