2015 was a special year. During a few months the political stars aligned and made it possible for the international community to agree on the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the Paris…

Today, more than ever, ‘Spaceship Earth’ is an apt metaphor as we chart the boundaries for a safe planet. Social scientists both ​analyse why society courts disaster by approaching or even…

Public goods provision is essential for economic development. Yet there is limited evidence regarding contributions to local public goods in developing countries. This article analyses a field…

We analyze optimal social discount rates when people derive utility from relative consumption, i.e. their own consumption level relative to the consumption level of others. We compare the social…

We measure people's pro-social behavior, in terms of voluntary money and labor contributions to an archetypical public good, a bridge, and in terms of voluntary money contributions in a public good…

We measure people's pro-social behavior, in terms of voluntary money and labor contributions to an archetypical public good, a bridge, and in terms of voluntary money contributions in a public good…

The optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example, is analyzed in a model where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both…

This paper derives Pareto-efficient provision rules for national and global public goods in a two-country world, where each individual cares about his or her relative consumption of private goods…

This paper concerns optimal redistributive non-linear income taxation in an OLG model, where people care about their own consumption relative to (i) other people's current consumption, (ii) own past…

Levels of trust are measured by asking standard survey questions on trust and by observing the behaviour in a trust game using a random sample in rural Bangladesh. Follow-up questions and correlations…