Natural Disasters and Social Preferences: The Effect of Tsunami-Memories on Cheating in Sri Lanka

This study analyses how past tsunami-memories affect cheating in Sri Lanka. Subjects are assigned to a treatment (control) group in which they watch a video about the calamity before (after) participating in a trust game. Cheating is elicited by asking trustors how much they need to receive not to feel cheated and trustees how much they need to return not to make the trustor feel cheated. Finally, participants report whether the video mostly reminded them about solidarity, looting or the calamity. Trustors show lower cheating standards and trustees more often satisfy the trustors’ cheating notion if they mostly recall solidarity.     

Virtuous Interactions in Removing Exclusion: The Link between Foreign Market Access and Access to Education

We outline a methodology which aims to give an answer to the widespread demand of impact analyses by regulators or by funding agencies which need to evaluate the current and past performance of development projects and may lack time series evidence. We devise a retrospective panel data approach to evaluate the dynamics of the effects of fair trade affiliation on the schooling decisions of a sample of Thai organic rice producers across the past 20 years. We find that the probability of school enrolment in families with more than two children is significantly affected by fair trade affiliation years. We try to ascertain whether our finding is robust to endogeneity of producers' choices of local cooperative affiliation and adoption of organic techniques. The significant difference between pre- and post-fair trade affiliation performance documents that fair trade participation generates a significant break in the schooling decisions of affiliated households.     

The political economy of hyperinflation in Venezuela

Public Choice - We study the Venezuelan hyperinflation as a political phenomenon with distributional and efficiency effects. The hyperinflation originated in publicly financed benefits for the...