Suchergebnisse

This paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion rates using disaggregated data for Italian municipalities. It measures the degree of social openness of a community by the diversity of its surname distribution, which reflects the history of migration and inbreeding. It shows that, all else equal, communities with a history of social closure have lower crime rates and higher tax evasion rates than more open communities. The effect of social closure is likely to be causal, it is relevant in magnitude, statistically significant, and robust to changes in the set of included controls, in the specific measures of dependent and independent variables, in the specification of the regression equation, and in the possible sample splits. Our findings are consistent with the idea that social closure strengthens social sancions and social control, thus leading to more cooperative outcomes in local interactions, but it reduces cooperation on a larger scale.

Abstract
In a small open economy with heterogeneous firms, in which tariffs determine the mass of active firms, the gains from trade liberalization depend positively on the level of firm vertical heterogeneity (quality heterogeneity) and negatively on transportation costs. The benefits from temporary protection depend on the quality gap: for a given mass of backward firms, the relative gains from protection increase with their quality and decrease with the quality of advanced firms; for given production quality levels, the relative advantage of protection increases with the mass of backward firms.

Der Autor erörtert die Organisationsstruktur und die Funktionen des internationalen Unternehmens für Meeresboden. Das Ziel dieses Unternehmens ist die Regelung der Rechte einzelner Länder zur Förderung von Konkretionen vom Meeresboden. Die Probleme der internationalen Aufteilung der Meere werden in den Konferenzen der Vereinigten Nationen für Seerecht debattiert. (BIOst-Ldg)

Aus sowjetischer Sicht

Beyond direct damages, terrorism creates fear and insecurity, potentially reducing support for democratic institutions if these are deemed inadequate to tackle the threat, and increasing support for military governments. To investigate this possibility, we use data from Pakistan, a country that experienced an exponential rise in terrorism since 2001. Exploiting individual level data on democratic attitudes and district level information on terrorist attacks, we document that persistent exposure to terrorism (and more broadly to violence) is associated to a significantly lower support for democratic values. Results are robust to the inclusion of different sets of controls, to sample splits based on gender, urbanization and education, and to endogeneity considerations. Instrumenting terrorism and violence by the distance from the Pak-Afghan border and by religious fractionalization suggests that the documented correlation reflects a causal impact. Terrorism thus threatens not only individuals, but also democratic institutions.

We report results from an incentivized laboratory experiment undertaken with the purpose of providing controlled evidence on the causal effects of alcohol consumption on risk-taking, time preferences and altruism. Our design disentangles the pharmacological effects of alcohol intoxication from those mediated by expectations, as we compare the behavior of three groups of subjects: those who participated in an experiment with no reference to alcohol, those who were exposed to the possibility of consuming alcohol but were given a placebo and those who effectively consumed alcohol. All subjects participated in a series of economic tasks administered in the same sequence across treatments. After controlling for both the willingness to pay for an object and the potential misperception of probabilities as elicited in the experiment, we detect no effect of alcohol in depleting subjects' risk tolerance. However, we find that alcohol intoxication increases impatience and makes subjects less altruistic.

Beyond direct damages, terrorism creates fear and insecurity, potentially reducing support for democratic institutions if these are deemed inadequate to tackle the threat, and increasing support for military governments. To investigate this possibility, we use data from Pakistan, a country that experienced an exponential rise in terrorism since 2001. Exploiting individual level data on democratic attitudes and district level information on terrorist attacks, we document that persistent exposure to terrorism (and more broadly to violence) is associated to a significantly lower support for democratic values. Results are robust to the inclusion of different sets of controls, to sample splits based on gender, urbanization and education, and to endogeneity considerations. Instrumenting terrorism and violence by the distance from the Pak-Afghan border and by religious fractionalization suggests that the documented correlation reflects a causal impact. Terrorism thus threatens not only individuals, but also democratic institutions.

We model interaction within the members of a work group, who carry on different projects and can choose to cooperate with each other or to exploit the work of the others. We focus our attention on the dynamic interdependence between their material performance and the structure of the relations among them. In particular, we assume that their satisfaction depends both upon the material outcome of their projects and upon the quality of their reciprocal relations (so that these two aspects are seen, to a certain extent, as psychological substitutes). As dissatisfaction may generate the disruption of social links, the consequent failure of the projects is a possible outcome. In turn, satisfactory relations and stable cooperation may loop positively together. Our model merges game theory and network representation of the relations among actors, thus opening a route of research that, to our knowledge, has not yet been explored.