In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards. Religions are...

Only yesterday, all animals were wild. Zoological archaeologists assert that about 15,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer forebears achieved the first domestication — the dog. Over the course of ensuing millennia, they proceeded to domesticate sheep, cattle, and other livestock. By the advent...

Economists believe that a problem of team production results from the desirability of production in (sometimes large) groups, the difficulty of rewarding individual group members based on their (difficult or impossible to measure) individual contributions, and the presumed interest of each...

In this paper, I test the effects of religious norms on the provision of public goods. My evidence is drawn from public goods experiments that I ran with regional bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Russia. I introduce three treatments, which I define as degrees of Eastern Orthodox...

In this paper we estimate the income distributional effects of the common agricultural policy (CAP) for farmers and landowners. First, we theoretically analyse the level of farmers' and landowners' gains from coupled and decoupled payments. Second, using a unique farm level panel data set from...

In this chapter, we review land market institutions in the European Union (EU) and their potential impact on land markets. We first review land tenure-/ownership regulations and find that they vary heavily across EU Member States. Four types of tenure-/ownership measures are implemented in the...

In designing a production model for firms that generate multiple outputs, we take as a starting point that such multi-output production refers to economies of scope, which in turn originate from joint input use and input externalities. We provide a nonparametric characterization of cost...

Suppose you propose to retrieve the means of production from the capitalist mode of production, turning them from alien forces conspiring against freedom into an expression of freedom. How might you do that? The question gives rise to a socialisation dilemma. The first horn of the dilemma,...

In this paper, we propose an evaluative framework to analyse Commons governance situations that use blockchain-based governance tools. Our research builds on a relatively recent field of literature linking the work of Elinor Ostrom and blockchain-based governance and unifies different strands to...

This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky’s 1916 seminal study about the working of cooperatives in a capitalist environment, which, due to historical and linguistic circumstances, has left only a limited trace in the subsequent economic literature in the...