We compare the determinants of individual giving between two countries, Spain and the US, which differ in their redistribution policies and their beliefs over the causes of poverty. By varying the information about the determinants of income, we find that, although overall giving is similar in both countries when subjects know the actual role of luck and effort, Spanish subjects give more when ...

If policy discounting is to have any welfare relevance, it must be a derivative of a social welfare function. If that derivative is to have a net present value (npv) form, the baseline allocation must be stationary. Given a stationary baseline in an overlapping generations growth economy the inter-generationally fair discount rate under the relative utilitarian welfare function equals the growt...

This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost to his or her survival. The social cost of political assassination is much smaller as politicians are replaceable. Conversely, the private cost of the securit...

Economists have long observed that crowding out of government grants to private charities is incomplete. The accepted belief is that givers treat the grants as imperfect substitutes for private giving. We theoretically and empirically investigate a second reason: the strategic response of a charity will be to reduce fund-raising efforts after receiving a grant. Employing panel data from arts an...

We have obtained spectra with the 10-m Keck telescope of a sample of 24 galaxies having colors consistent with star-forming galaxies at redshifts 2 ∼z ∼ 4.5 in the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). Eleven of these galaxies are confirmed to be at high redshift (zmed = 3.0), one is at z = 0.5, and the other 12 have uncertain redshifts but have spectra consistent with their being at z > 2. The spectra of t...

Antibody 34E4 catalyzes the conversion of benzisoxazoles to salicylonitriles with high rates and multiple turnovers. The crystal structure of its complex with the benzimidazolium hapten at 2.5-angstroms resolution shows that a combination of hydrogen bonding, pi stacking, and van der Waals interactions is exploited to position both the base, Glu(H50), and the substrate for efficient proton tran...

This paper examines the dynamic effects of government outlays on economic growth and the unemployment rate. Using vector autoregression and data from twenty OECD countries over three recent decades, we found: (1) positive shocks to government outlays slow down economic growth and raise the unemployment rate; (2) different types of government outlays have different effects on growth and unemploy...

We compare the determinants of individual giving between two countries, Spain and the US, which differ in their redistribution policies and their beliefs over the causes of poverty. By varying the information about the determinants of income, we find that, although overall giving is similar in both countries when subjects know the actual role of luck and effort, Spanish subjects give more when ...

This paper examines government expenditure convergence within the expanded European Union. Except for a few cases convergence was generally not validated for government consumption, transfers, subsidies nor for their aggregate, all expressed in constant real per capita terms. Neither was any long run equilibrium relationship found between these categories of expenditures and GDP. Causality test...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are much smaller than differences with respect to inequality perceptions or redistributive preferences. ...