How does a citizen's decision to participate in political activism depend on the participation of others? We conduct a nation-wide natural field experiment in collaboration with a major European party during a recent national election. In a seemingly unrelated survey, we randomly provide...

We provide a test of the role of social preferences and beliefs in voluntary cooperation and its decline. We elicit individuals' cooperation preferences in one experiment and use them as well as subjects' elicited beliefs to explain contributions to a public good played repeatedly. We find...

In the last thirty years, economists and other social scientists have investigated people's normative views on distributive justice. Here we study people's normative views in social dilemmas, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance. Using insights from moral philosophy...

We provide quantitative evidence on the relationship between military spending and innovation in the 19th century. Combining innovation data from world fairs and historical military data across Europe, we show that national military spending is associated with national innovation towards war...

In the US and many other OECD countries, expenditures for defense-related R&D represent a key policy channel through which governments shape innovation, and dwarf all other public subsidies for innovation. We examine the impact of government funding for R&D - and defense-related R&D in...

We use the synthetic control method to estimate the effect of international banking and energy sanctions from 2012 to 2015 on military spending of Iran. We create a synthetic control group that mimics the socioeconomic characteristics of Iran before the international sanctions of 2012. We then...

Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...

Can the provision of public goods strengthen the fiscal capacity of governments in developing countries and move them toward an equilibrium of widespread tax compliance? We present evidence of the impact of local public infrastructure on tax compliance, leveraging a large public investment...

We consider ultimatum bargaining over the provision of a public good. Offer-maker and responder can delegate their decisions to agents, whose actual decision rules are opaque. We show that the responder will benefit from strategic opacity, even with bilateral delegation. The incomplete...