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 experiment where all 200 households in a village in rural Vietnam make real contributions to a public good that is very important for them in daily life�a bridge. We study the role of social influenc…

We study the trend in household income uncertainty using a novel approach that measures income uncertainty at each future horizon as the variance of forecast errors without imposing specific parametric restrictions on the underlying income shocks. We document a widespread increase in household income uncertainty since the early 1970s that is both statistically and economically significant. For …

A number of empirical studies have investigated the influence of a desire to emulate the rich on individuals� allocation of time, most of which suggest that more work hours rather than leisure time are likely to be induced when relative status is the concern. However, the results in this article suggest that this is not true in Australia. We examine the effect of inequality on work hours …

This research estimates models of the importance of conscientiousness for socioeconomic outcomes. We use measures of conscientiousness at age 16 to explain adult wages and other outcomes, such as employment, education, health, and savings behaviour. We use several waves from the 1970 British Cohort Study. Our estimates suggest a significant and sizeable correlation between early conscientiousne…

We study self-enforcing international environmental agreements (IEAs) in a model with symmetric countries, international trade, and emission tax policy and find that the first-best global IEA may be self-enforcing. This is in sharp contrast to the known case of cap-and-trade policy in which self-enforcing IEAs have fewer signatories and fail to achieve significant improvements in welfare and da…

The comments by Dale Squires and co-authors are interesting and appreciated for at least two reasons. First, researchers with an applied and hands-on background make an effort to work through a game-theoretic model and evaluate it. Second, they provide detailed comments about the realism of the model and suggest possible ways to improve it. We thank the authors for going through all the pain of…

Scope and compatibility of measures in international fisheries agreements� uses game theory and bioeconomic modelling to break important ground and provides a real contribution to the economics of international fisheries agreements (IFAs). In this comment we wish to raise two issues relevant to the modelling framework used in the article that is one widely adopted in this area. The first …

We set up a model that captures the spatial dimension of international fisheries in legal (i.e., internationally accessible high seas versus state-owned exclusive economic zones) and biological (i.e., various intensities of fish migration between zones) terms. We compare the success of regional fishery management organizations (RFMOs) for the first-best and two alternative management scenarios,…

Contractual inefficiencies within supply chains increase an input price above its marginal cost, therefore they are considered detrimental to consumer surplus. We argue that such inefficiencies may be beneficial to consumers in qualitydifferentiated markets. Indeed, enhancing contractual efficiency in high-quality supply chains may adversely affect the market structure by driving low-quality ve…

This article investigates the association between stock market activity and mental well-being, exploiting the availability of interview dates in the British Household Panel Survey to match changes in the FTSE 100 stock price index to respondents over the period 1991�2008. We present evidence that annual changes in the price index are associated with better mental well-being whilst greater …