Well-functioning groups enforce social norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. Here we study how the exogenous assignment to different positions in an extreme social hierarchy - the caste system - affects individuals'...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

The paper - which will introduce the book Intellectual Property Rights: Legal and Economic Challenges for Development, edited by M. Cimoli, G. Dosi, K. Maskus, R. Okediji, J. Reichman and J. Stiglitz, Oxford University Press, forthcoming - discusses the role of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)...

Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in the classical sense, rejecting any sub-field labelling of his interests and...

Changes in the role of collective action at the international level, in the international economic environment, and, most importantly, our better understanding of economics in general require that we rethink the role of international financial institutions (IFIs). For multilateral development...

While it is futile to search for any 'magic policy recipe' automatically yielding industrialization, the contributions to the book, we argue, do indeed help in identifying some basic ingredients and principles that successful policy arrangements historically had and have in common. In this...