Does social recognition motivate prosocial individuals? We run large-scale experiments among members of Italy's main blood donors association, testing social recognition both through social media and peer groups. We experimentally disentangle visibility concerns and peer comparisons, and we...

We evaluate the impact of government spending efficiency on fiscal sustainability for a panel of 35 OECD countries during the period of 2007-2020. To answer our research question we first compute the magnitude of the responses of government revenues to changes in government spending. Next, we...

German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it provides unique insights into the role of country-specific shocks in...

In this article, we use a meta-analysis to examine the performance of socially responsible investing (SRI). After a thorough literature search, we review 153 empirical studies containing 1,047 observations of SRI performance. We find that, on average, SRI neither outperforms nor underperforms...

The present note raises the issue of how best to interpret the World Bank's (WB) much used "constant USD per capita income" concept and similar series. We find that the guide to its construction appearing on the WB data portal to be sketchy. The procedures essentially convert all host-country...

Climate change policies have been rising to the top of the global political agenda, but how should governments finance them? Public economists propose solutions based on economic theory, but their political feasibility depends on voters' support, and ordinary households often neglect economic...

This paper provides a new measure of human capital using PISA and PIAAC surveys, and mean years of schooling. The new measure is a cohort-weighted average of past PISA scores (representing the quality of education) of the working age population and the corresponding mean years of schooling...

We construct several measures for the global financial cycle using dynamic factor models and data for 25 advanced and emerging countries over 1980-2019. Our results suggest that global cycles in asset prices and capital flows are highly similar and synchronized, especially during crisis...

This paper explains the occurrence of hypocrisy – when the by-society most despised types pretend to be the most revered types. Real-world phenomena include pedophile priests, sex-offender feminists and seemingly very busy dispensable office workers. Building on the signaling framework of...

Social tipping can accelerate beneficial changes in behaviour in diverse domains from equality and social justice to climate change. Hypothetically, however, group identities might undermine tipping in ways policy makers do not anticipate. To examine this, we implemented an experiment around the...