This paper examines the effect of income inequality on the quality of public education in the presence of weak institutions and tax evasion. Our theoretical model predicts that higher level income inequality within a country leads to lower quality of public education and that this effect is...

This research establishes that religiosity has a persistent effect on economic outcomes. First we use a sample of migrants in the US to establish that religiosity at the country of origin has a long lasting effect on the religiosity of migrants. Second, exploiting variations in the inherited...

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development...

We provide empirical support and a theoretical explanation for the vicious circle of political corruption and tax evasion in which countries often fall into. We address this issue in the context of a model with two distinct groups of agents: citizens and politicians. Citizens decide the fraction...

This research exploits the event of immigration to establish that institutions have a persistent effect on culture. It is argued that immigrants coming from corrupt countries, tend to overtrust the institutions at the host country. This inflated trust of immigrants is documented as the Great...

This paper examines the effect of income inequality on the quality of public education in the presence of weak institutions and tax evasion. Our theoretical model predicts that higher level income inequality within a country leads to lower quality of public education and that this effect is...

This paper explores the interplay between past exposure to macroeconomic shocks and populist attitudes. We document that individuals who experienced a macroeconomic shock during their impressionable years (between 18 and 25 years of age), are currently more prone to voting for populist parties,...

This research empirically establishes and theoretically motivates the hypothesis that population aging has a hump-shaped effect on inventive activity. We estimate this hump-shaped relationship in a panel of 33 OECD countries over the period 1960-2012. The increasing part of the hump captures the...

This research empirically establishes the hypothesis that the process of population aging in a society as a whole affects the attitudes of its members towards immigration. Hence, an aging social environment exerts an effect on the attitudes of individuals towards immigration after accounting for...

This paper investigates both theoretically and empirically the hypothesis that individual environmental attitudes can be partly accounted for by a cultural component. To empirically identify this component, we exploit variation associated with international migration ows. We find that the...