Mechanisms employing fines and rewards may be introduced in multi-equilibrium situations to enforce a certain equilibrium. The mechanism does two things. First, it produces a signal disrupting the normal dynamics of repeated play; potentially encouraging agents to reconsider their expectations....

Social norms and conventions have formally been defined as pertaining to static sets of situations. In this paper, we introduce a slight variation of Cristina Bicchieri's definition, where the set of situations is dynamically determined by previous actions. To suggest how the definition may be...

Using data from the World Value Survey we examine first and second generation immigrants’ attitudes towards income inequality and redistribution. We find that first generation immigrants are on average less favorable to redistribution compared to non-immigrants. This effect is particularly...

In most OECD-countries, immigrants have lower employment and higher unemployment than natives. This paper compares nine potential explanations of these gaps. Results are obtained for 21–28 countries using bivariate correlations, OLS-regressions and Bayesian model averaging over all 512...

We study the effects of institutional instability on growth. Using principal components analysis, we construct measures of institutional quality and instability from the political risk index of the International Country Risk Guide. A panel-data analysis of 132 countries during 1984–2004...

In this paper, we use data from a corruption survey conducted among top politicians and high level civil servants in 290 Swedish municipalities in 2007 to investigate the effects of government size on corruption. We construct several measures of corruption based on the survey, and combine these...

The cross-country correlation between social trust and income equality is well documented, but few studies examine the direction of causality. We show theoretically that by facilitating cooperation, trust may increase efficiency and lead to more equal outcomes, while the feedback from inequality...

This paper discusses a number of questions with regard to Sweden’s economic and political development: How did Sweden become rich? What explains Sweden’s high level of income equality? What were the causes of Sweden’s problems from 1970 to 1995? How is it possible that Sweden, since the...

We use individual and multi-level data from Zambia on child nutritional health to test the absolute income hypothesis (AIH), the relative income hypothesis (RIH) and the income inequality hypothesis (IIH). The results confirm a non-linear positive relation between economic resources and health,...