Interrelated global crises - climate change, pandemics, loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity - pose risks that demand collective solutions. Uncertainty about others' behavior, coupled with the dependence on some to take collective efforts to mitigate risks for all (e.g. conservation of...

This study investigates how institutional rules and fairness in enforcement affect cooperation and compliance in heterogenous groups. In a preregistered online experiment (n = 1, 254), we vary both the existence of a rule governing contributions to a public good as well as whether enforcement of...

A global monopoly supplier country of green goods which are essential for the provision of global environmental public goods optimally subsidizes the export of such goods in an interior contribution equilibrium. This is not counterbalanced by an incentive to improve the terms-of-trade, since any...

Two phenomena are increasingly reshaping the world economy. One is the growing and well-documented importance of climate transition policies that differ across countries. The other is the stark rise of geoeconomic fragmentation (GEF) concerns. While differences in climate transition policies are...

Gallice and Monzón (2019) present a natural environment that sustains full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. They demonstrate that in a sequential public goods game, where agents lack knowledge of their position in the sequence but can...

We characterize 'Games of Altruistic Cooperation' as a class of games in which cooperation leaves the individual and the group of decision-makers worse off than defection, but favors individuals outside the group. An example is climate change mitigation. In this context, we experimentally...

When Chinese start-up DeepSeek released R1 in January 2025, the groundbreaking open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model rocked the tech industry as a more cost-effective alternative to models running on more advanced chips. The launch coincided with industrial policy gaining popularity as...

GoBs are goods for which agents have non-monotonic preferences: more is beneficial only up to an ideal level, beyond which additional quantities become undesirable. We analyze public GoBs (non-excludable and non-rival) through a theoretical framework applicable to diverse contexts such as solar...

Putting the high public debt ratios on a downward path after the surge during the pandemic and allocating sufficient resources to deliver on the green and digital transition will be among the priorities confronting the EU institutions emerging from the June 2024 European elections. After a long...

Can the provision of public goods strengthen the fiscal capacity of governments in developing countries and move them toward an equilibrium of widespread tax compliance? We present evidence of the impact of local public infrastructure on tax compliance, leveraging a large public investment...

Governments often choose deficit financing over budget cuts or tax increases to fund public goods, driven by the political unpopularity of the latter options. This study investigates the potential trade-off between maintaining prudent public finances and securing voter support by analyzing the...

Women are often perceived as more compliant than men; however, the literature provides inconclusive evidence. Using a novel experimental design comprising two complementary experiments, we test this claim in online samples representative of the German adult population. The first experiment...

Corruption is the great disease of government. It undermines the efficiency of the public sector in many countries around the world. We experimentally study civic engagement (CE) as a constraint on corruption when incentives are stacked against providing CE. We show that CE is powerful in...

The European fiscal governance framework remains incomplete, hindering policy coordination during economic shocks and affecting the transmission of the single monetary policy. High public debt and low public investment worsen resilience across Member States. Many policymakers, institutions, and...

This study analyzes how the willingness to pay (WTP) for a risk reduction for traffic accidents varies depending on the specific traffic safety measures and whether they are framed as public or private goods. Building on previous studies, we designed and conducted a contingent valuation survey...