Humans are much more cooperative than other vertebrates. In other species, cooperation is mainly limited to close relatives, there is little division of labor, no trade, and no large scale conflict, the sick and disabled must fend for themselves, and the strong take from the weak without fear of sanctions by third parties. In contrast, division of labor, trade, and large scale conflict are prom...

Why do some new political parties take root after rising to electoral prominence, while others collapse after their initial success? Although strong parties are critical for stable, high-quality democracy, relatively little is known about the conditions under which strong parties emerge. The classic literature on party-system development is largely based on studies of the United States and West...

Does Secular Education Impact Religiosity, Electoral Participation and the Propensity to Vote for Islamic Parties? Evidence from an Education Reform in a Muslim Country Using a unique survey of adults in Turkey, we find that an increase in educational attainment, due to an exogenous secular education reform, decreases women’s propensity to identify themselves as religious, lowers their tendency...

Job Loss Fears and (Extremist) Party Identification: First Evidence from Panel Data There is a large body of literature analyzing the relationship between objective economic conditions and voting behavior, but there is very little evidence of how perceived economic insecurity impacts on political preferences. Using seventeen years of household panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we...

There is a large body of literature analyzing the relationship between objective economic conditions and voting behavior, but there is very little evidence of how perceived economic insecurity impacts on political preferences. Using seventeen years of household panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine whether job loss fears impact on individuals’ party identification. Consist...

Does International Outsourcing Really Lower Workers’ Income? We analyze the impact of international outsourcing on income, if the domestic labor market is imperfect. We distinguish in our analysis between the case where the parties negotiate over the wage only and where they negotiate over both wage and profit share. We find that in the first case outsourcing will reduce (increase) workers’ inc...

While online Crowdsourcing marketplaces provide a powerful avenue for facilitating new forms of informationdriven micro-labor, their practical value is significantly reduced by worker “spam” and employer fraud. We hypothesize anonymity of parties is a major source of these problems, and we thus propose a human-centric solution: encourage employers and workers to voluntarily deanonymize in order...

Firms increasingly use contingent labor to flexibly respond to demand in many environments. Labor supply agencies are growing to fill this need. As a result, firms and agencies are engaging in long-term contracts for labor supply. We develop mathematical models of the interaction between firms and labor supply agencies when demand and supply are uncertain. We consider two models of labor supply...

Against the background of the changing relationships between trade unions and political parties in Western Europe, this paper examines the nature and outcomes of union–party alliances in East Central Europe. The paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, the nature of union–party ties in postcommunism is significantly different and can be best described as an inverse dependency relations...