Microcredit, or small, short-term loans to the very poor, can help to bring about wholesale changes not only in personal income and the local marketplace, but also by adding meaning to life, building self-esteem and encouraging social integration. The cash advance is only the vehicle. The...

At the end of World War II, the United States emerged as a world leader, putting into place international institutions based on its own liberal economic philosophy. Since then, the world has witnessed an increasing interconnectedness among states, with economic relationships continually blurring...

The dissertation, Repression and Network Science: Tools in Fight againstTerrorism, explores what determines post‐terror repression in democracies andwhat alternative tools network science may ultimately reveal to for compellingauthorities to rely on repression less. To do this three papers...

The literature of private provision of public goods suggests thatincentive to contribute is inversely related to group size. This paperempirically tests this relationship using field data from ChineseWikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We exploit an exogenous reduction ingroup size as a result of...

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] The provision of public goods under asymmetric information has most oftenbeen viewed as a mechanism design problem under the aegis of an uninformedmediator. This paper focuses on institutional contexts without...

In Chapter 2, we present a model that allows us to study the effect ofincreased competition among charities for donations, and show that it willresult in a lower provision of public goods. When charities get donations,they must pay two fundraising costs: a travel cost and an extra cost,...

We examine the impact of scal policy on macroeconomic performance when public goods play a dual role by simultaneously providing both productive and utility services to the private sector. When these services are subject to congestion, a consumption tax is distortionary, generating a dynamic...

We examine the impact of scal policy on macroeconomic performance when public goods play a dual role by simultaneously providing both productive and utility services to the private sector. When these services are subject to congestion, a consumption tax is distortionary, generating a dynamic...

Recent work by Kahneman and others has led to a new focus in economics on a wellbeing-based approach to utility. This suggests that ‘experienced utility’ is an alternative and more appropriate basis for the measurement of economic value compared with ‘decision utility’. In this paper, we...