While trade liberalization has always been the core of common policies, only in very recent years Europe has started to address the challenge of migration in a comprehensive way. Conventional wisdom considers potential gains from liberalizing trade much higher for European countries than the...

Questionnaires eliciting the absolutist Vs relativist perception of poverty are administered to 1,941 undergraduate students in eight countries –Bolivia, Brazil, Italy, Kenya, Laos, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. We find that the perception of poverty expressed by a large fraction of...

We present and experimentally test a theoretical model of majority threshold determination as a function of voters' risk preferences. The experimental results confirm the theoretical prediction of a positive correlation between a voter's risk aversion and the corresponding preferred majority...

Self-reported life satisfaction is highly heterogeneous across similar countries. We show that this phenomenon can by largely explained by the fact that individuals adopt different scales and benchmarks in evaluating themselves. Using a cross sectional dataset on individuals aged 50 and over in...

One of the key issues for understanding reciprocity is how people evaluate the kindness of an action. In this paper we argue that the motivation driving an action plays an important role for the reciprocating response to that action. We test experimentally the hypothesis that reciprocal behavior...

We study the effects on voluntary contributions of unpacking a single linear public good into distinct but identical parts. In our experiment, subjects either participate to a one linear public good game or a two linear and identical public goods game, with marginal per capita returns of...

In this paper I explore asymmetric coalitional bargaining. Players are possibly different in preferences and in probability to place threats; the agreements emerge randomly during negotiations. As a result, players negotiate with different degree of enthusiasm. I compute a solution that I call...

Mimicking standard features of electoral accountability and selection models, we conduct a computerized laboratory experiment in order to identify the influence of other-regarding preferences on democratic outcomes. We find that elected candidates are more pro-social towards their constituency...

Voting is a lottery in which an individual who is uncertain about how the others vote wins if she belongs to the majority or loses if she falls into the minority. The risk of losing can be reduced by increasing the majority threshold. This however has the negative effect of also lowering the...

The 2006 Spring European Council assessed the competitiveness of the European Union, according to the so-called “Lisbon Strategy” started in 2000. The complexity of the Lisbon Strategy, and its poor results after five years since its implementation, required a renewed commitment, thus the EU...