A recent experimental study by Falk and Szech (Science, 2013) concludes that „markets erode moral values”. If this were true, economists, who have emphasized the efficiency enhancing effects of markets for centuries, would have to reconsider their judgments fundamentally. This would be no...

We use a controlled laboratory experiment with and without overlapping generations to study the emergence of public debt. Public debt is chosen by popular vote, pays for public goods, and is repaid with general taxes. With a single generation, public debt is accumulated prudently, never leading...

The dynamics of behavior observed in standard public-good experiments can be explained by imperfect conditional cooperation combined with social learning (Fischbacher and Gächter, 2010). But it is unclear what determines first-round contributions. We argue that first-round contributions depend...

Repeated experiments with a time span of one week between repetitions are used in order to test two related hypotheses. The first is the moral self-licensing effect, which describes peo-ple's tendency to allow themselves to act more selfishly on the back of previous prosocial or selfless...

To examine the effect of group size on the stability of prosocial behavior we used standard one-shot public good experiments with two and four subjects, which were conducted repeatedly three times at intervals of one week. Partner and stranger treatments were employed to control for group...

Choosing between selfish and non-selfish behavior in real life is a repeated decision with var-ying time spans between repetitions. To learn more about the dynamics of altruistic behavior, we use repeated standard dictator experiments. The dynamics of prosocial behavior in these experiments...

In this paper, we shed more light on the subjective well-being of workfare participants and compare it to the well-being of unemployed and employed workers. We use data from a self-conducted survey among participants in workfare schemes in Germany. We examine two subdimensions of subjective...

Das Erneuerbare Energiengesetz sieht für Strom aus Erneuerbaren Energien Einspeisevergütungen ohne eine Mengenbegrenzung vor. Dies führt zu fehlgeleiteten Anreizen, die einerseits den Strompreis erhöhen und andererseits den technischen Fortschritt begrenzen. Joachim Weimann setzt sich...