This paper investigates the role played by the cultural norms of particularism and universalism for collusive bribery. In our theoretical framework, the act of proposing or demanding a bribe violates a commonly held social norm, thus producing a psychological cost. By lowering this psychological...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the informative content of indicators of trade exhibition activity for business cycle analysis. We analyse the comovements between alternative indicators of trade exhibition activity and reference variables at both aggregate and disaggregate...

Most recent empirical analyses of aggregate economic fluctuations rely on the implicit assumption that business cycles are all alike. This paper investigates this assumption for the long-run international data set of Backus and Kehoe and presents the results of statistical tests of the...

This paper presents the results of a survey-based experiment on the role of equity and efficiency for altruistic behavior. Using simple binary decisions for a representative pool of subjects, we find that both equity and efficiency are relevant for the decision to give. However, contrary to the...