Political corruption is a concern of many modern democracies. It weakens democraticinstitutions, restricts public services, and lowers productivity undermining economicdevelopment. Yet despite its importance, our understanding of what determines corruption islimited. This paper uses a novel...

In an investment contest for environmental policy, polluters and victims ofpollution invest in an increase of their marginal benefits of pollution and environmentalquality, respectively. These investments influence time-consistent environmental policy...

Many researchers have found game theory a useful method for analyzing internationalenvironmental problems. However, game theory has been criticized for being too theoretical,abstracting from too many practical problems and being based on very specific assumptions.This article tries to qualify...

This paper shows that although small or nancially constrained environmentalistgroups may be in a weak position, relative to polluting industries, in the directcompetition for political inuence, they can compete indirectly through changingpublic preferences over environmental quality. However, in...

The aim of the paper is to study the relation between the demand for human rights and foreconomic prosperity. It analyzes the demand not, as it is often done in the literature, from the“voice” perspective (political activity), but rather looks at the “exit” perspective...

Generally, Democrats do not increase military spending, and Republicans do not raise welfare payments. Mostly, ruling politicians stick to the manifesto of their party. The current paper provides a theoretical explanation for this phenomenonthat does not assume politicians or voters to be...

We conduct a large-scale …eld experiment with 2,440 subjects in whichwe exogenously vary the price of contributing to the closest empiricalcounterpart of an in…nitely large public good, climate change mitigation.We …nd that the price e¤ect is robust and negative, but quantitativelyweak, with...

This article examines the nature of human behavior in a nested socialdilemma referred to as the Spillover Game. Players are divided into twogroups with positive production interdependencies. Based on theoreticallyderived opportunistic, local, and global optima, our experimental...

In this paper, we study a voluntary contribution mechanism withone-way communication. The relevance of one person’s words is assessedby assigning exogeniously the role of the ‘communicator’ to onegroup member. Contrary to the view that the mutual exchange ofpromises is necessary for the...

One-way communication has been found to substantially increasecontributions in linear voluntary contribution mechanisms. We confirmthe robustness of this result in the presence of income heterogeneity.