This article concerns the question whether free trade can be seen as a collective action problem. More specifically, I investigate whether one key characteristic of collective action is present in the case of trade: a common interest. I argue that while states at an aggregate level might have...

In this paper, we document a novel fact that disclosures of public information reshape social dynamics in China. Using the staggered roll-out of a quasi-natural experiment of air pollution information disclosure and a novel high-frequency data set of social and public events, we find...

Using a novel city-level high-frequency panel data set of social and public events in Chinese cities, we document that extreme high temperatures significantly reshape social dynamics. Extreme high temperatures lead to an increase in social cooperation, and the effects are more salient when...

This paper establishes a novel argument that social networks among local politicians reduce spatial frictions of corporate investment. We leverage the replacement of city officials and the resulting exogenous variations of hometown ties among city party secretaries to examine their impact on...

In this paper, I provide the first cross-country empirical analysis to establish three stylized facts on electoral incentive dynamics, national leaders' capability, and economic performance, using a novel data set of national leaders' personal and tenure characteristics and countries'...

I propose a mathematically tractable model to study the optimal compensation scheme in organizations with arbitrary interpersonal networks, in which agents connected in a network help neighbors and work collectively to produce a team's output, and payment is an equity share linked to the...

This paper is devoted to the possibility of creating worker cooperatives in which worker members are remunerated not through wages, but through dividends calculated on the added value produced by the enterprise, that is, cooperatives in which there is no labor cost, but only dividends on the net...

International cooperation over the major rivers in South Asia took a new turn with the signing in 1996 and 1997 of five innovative water, power and economic cooperation agreements. The innovations include four elements: (i) the transfer of some previously diplomatic questions into the sphere of...

This paper focuses on a relatively new issue in the debate on policy coherence for development: the incoherence between tax and aid policies, using a case study of the Netherlands as illustration. Although the Netherlands cannot be considered a ‘pure’ tax haven like the Cayman Islands and...

Democracy resolves conflicts in difficult games like Prisoners’ Dilemma and Chicken by stabilizing their cooperative outcomes. It does so by transforming these games into games in which voters are presented with a choice between a cooperative outcome and a Pareto-inferior noncooperative...