Social preferences for the punishment of free riders are critical for generating cooperative behavior in human society. Focusing on the receiving fees of Japan's public broadcaster, this study analyses how punishment of free riders, that is, the strengthening of legal responses against them,...

This paper examines efficiency in the provision and utilization of a congestible public input in a symmetric tax competition framework with wage rigidities. Despite the fact that also lump-sum taxation is available for regional governments, second-best efficiency emerges only as a special case...

I analyze the effects of ethnic divisions on the provision of public goods. Using OpenStreetMap data, I construct a new global dataset of locations of public amenities, such as schools, hospital and libraries. I allow for the possibility that the data may be systematically incomplete using two...

We use an experiment to test the hypothesis that groups consisting of like-minded cooperators are able to cooperate irrespective of punishment and therefore have a lower demand for a costly punishment institution than groups of like-minded free riders, who are unable to cooperate without...

The Paris Agreement aims at limiting the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels. A key component of the agreement are "nationally determined contributions" (NDC). For this, non-state actors such as civil society groups, economic actors, and subnational...

Standard program evaluations implicitly assume that individuals are perfectly informed about the considered policy change and the related institutional rules. This seems not very plausible in many contexts, as diverse examples show. However, evidence on how incomplete information affects the...

Creating distributional national accounts (DINA; e.g. Piketty, Saez, and Zucman 2018) requires the allocation of all government expenditure to individuals in order to compute their post-tax, post-transfer income. A sizeable part of government expenditure is in-kind spending, either in the form of...