Socially destructive behavior in a public good environment - like damaging public goods - is an underexposed phenomenon in economics. In an experiment we investigate whether such behavior can be influenced by the very nature of an environment. To that purpose we use a Fragile Public Good (FPG)...

We analyze voluntary coalition formation using a unique panel data for 1,056 municipalities in the French region of Brittany between 1995 and 2002. We use a control function approach to develop a binary discrete choice model with spatial interactions. We find that a municipality’s decision to...

Cooperation among local governments has been encouraged to enable the aggregation of resources and improved public sector efficiency. However, if cooperation through the joint delivery of local public services is likely to be welfare enhancing for the agglomeration, but will lead to losses for...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of inter-municipal fiscal cooperation on municipal public spending, based on the French experience. We estimate a model of municipal spending choice using panel data and spatial econometrics for municipalities over the period 1994-2003. We...

We study the formation of mutual insurance networks in a model where every agent who obtains more resources gives a fixed amount of resources to all agents who have obtained less resources. The low resource agent must be directly linked to the high resource agent to receive this transfer. We...

We examine the temporal stability of risk preference measures obtained by different elicitation methods in a controlled laboratory experiment at two distinct times. Our results indicate remarkable temporal stability of risk measures at the aggregated level and temporal instability at the...

This article addresses the reactions of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) economies to external shocks. Because it was conceived as a political alliance, the UNASUR is likely to be a promising integration project. Thus, assessing the union from an economic perspective is essential....

The scientific environment might influence university researchers’ job designs. In a principal–agent model, researchers must choose between substitutable tasks, publishing or teaching, according to their individual abilities and the scientific and pedagogical context that exists in their...

The transferability of cost evaluation results is studied using Principal Component Analysis and Euclidean distances. The method allows to determine whether the transferability of the results across countries is low, medium or high. The use of these two validated tools for measuring result...

Experimental studies of social dilemmas have shown that while the existence of a sanctioning institution improves cooperation within groups, it also has a detrimental impact on group earnings in the short-run. Could the introduction of pre-play threats to punish have enough of a beneficial...