In this paper we first critically review conventional environmental economics. We conclude that the standard theory offers too narrow a perspective for many real world problems and that many theories are not empirically tested. Consequently, environmental economics is at risk of producing...

Global environmental problems are often assumed to imply extensive inefficiencies since there is no global authority corresponding to the government at a national level. This paper shows, on the contrary, that rich countries in a free unregulated market may still undertake globally efficient...

Social preferences have been shown to be an important determinant of economic decision making for many adults. We present a large-scale experiment with 883 children and adolescents, aged eight to seventeen years. Participants make decisions in eight simple, one-shot allocation tasks, allowing us...

We examine social preferences of Swedish and Austrian children and adolescents using the experimental design of Charness and Rabin (2002). We find that difference aversion decreases while social-welfare preferences increase with age.<p>

This paper explores how information about paired subject's previous action affects one's own behavior in a dictator game. The first experiment puts dictators in two environments where they can either give money to the paired player or take money away from them: one where the recipient is a...

The problem of the consideration of any interest like usury and the ways to avoid the ecclesiastical condemnation were some of the main economic and moral topics of the traditional Europe. This paper shows the origins and foundations of the ecclesiastical doctrine on the usury, the appearance of...

Trust is measured using both survey questions and a standard trust experiment using a random sample of individuals in rural Bangladesh. We found no significant effect of the social distance between Hindus and Muslims in the trust experiment in terms of fractions sent or returned, but the...

Observed by more than 1.5 billion Muslims, Ramadan is one of the most celebrated religious rituals in the world. We investigate stock returns during Ramadan for 14 predominantly Muslim countries over the years 1989-2007. The results show that stock returns during Ramadan are almost nine times...

Using quasi-experimental data, this paper examines the relationship between religiosity and prosocial behavior. In contrast to previous studies which identify religious people by how often they attend religious services or by their self-reported religiosity, this study compares the behavior of...