Evidence for the OECD countries show that the “great ratios”, such as the unemployment rate, factor shares, Tobin's q and the investment-capital ratio, fluctuate significantly on medium-term frequencies of 10-40 years duration. To explain these medium-term fluctuations, we establish a...

Cooperation can be induced by an authority with the power to mete out sanctions for free riders, but law enforcement is prone to error. This paper experimentally analyzes preferences for and consequences of errors in formal sanctions against free riders in a public goods game. With type I...

Economic historians have stressed that income convergence was a key feature of the 'OECD-club' and that globalization was among the accelerating forces of this process in the long-run. This view has however been challenged, since it suffers from an ad hoc selection of countries. In the paper, a...

Analyses of European governance usually put the member states in the foreground, placing the citizens in the background. This article brings explanations of EU legitimacy down to the level of individuals. A method is suggested that combines explanations based on individual interests and a...

Asset prices tend to undergo wide swings around long-run equilibrium values which can have detrimental effects on the real economy. To get a better understanding of how the financial sector and the real economy interact this paper models the long swings in the Swiss franc-US dollar foreign...

It is a well known fact that economic development and distance to the equator are positively correlated variables in the world today. It is perhaps less well known that as recently as 1500 C.E. it was the other way around. The present paper provides a theory of why the "latitude gradient"...

Consumers have bounded perception and treat similar goods as homogeneous. The interaction between this bias and the structure of firms is studied in a vertically differentiated duopoly with market entry. With fixed costs of quality, natural monopoly and entry deterrence occurs at lower entry...

We investigate experimentally the effects of corrupt experts on information aggregation in committees. We find that non-experts are significantly less likely to delegate through abstention when there is a probability that experts are corrupt. Such decreased abstention when the probability of...

We interview both parents and their children enrolled in six primary schools in the district of Treviso (Italy). We study the structural differences between the children network of friends reported by children and the one elicited asking their parents. We find that the parents’ network has a...

Free riding problems can be more severe in multiple-person social dilemmas than in two-person dilemmas, since agents can hide their actions behind the veil of anonymity. In this paper, we use field data on waste sorting to study the effect of visibility in social dilemmas. We compare the sorting...