It has been shown that higher capital taxes can have a growth-enhancing effect when combined with a revenue-compensating cut in wage taxes (Uhlig and Yanagawa 1996; European Economic Review 40, 1521–1540) or with an expansion in productivity-increasing public services (Rivas 2003; European Economic Review 47, 477–503). The present paper demonstrates that these results critically hinge on the ex...

Empirical evidence suggests that parents who have themselves inherited from their own parents are more likely to leave an estate to their children even after controlling for income, wealth and education. This implies an indirect reciprocal behavior between three generations by transmitting the attitude towards bequeathing from one generation to the next. We incorporate such an intergenerational...

Can a generation’s discounting of future generations’ consumption utilities be interpreted as “pure” altruism towards future generations, that is, a concern that these are better off according to their likewise forward-looking preferences? It turns out that the answer is positive for many but not all discount functions used in the economics literature. In particular, traditional exponential dis...

People often act as if they care about others’ welfare as well as their own (i.e. have “social preferences”). One plausible assumption is that people have preferences for social implications of their actions, determined by exogenous “conventions”, in addition to the material consequences of actions. I construct games with conventions using the psychological games framework developed in Geanakop...

This paper uses a three-games (or triadic) design to identify trusting and reciprocating behavior. A large literature on single-game trust and reciprocity experiments is based on the implicit assumption that subjects do not have altruistic or inequality-averse other-regarding preferences. Such experimental designs test compound hypotheses that include the hypothesis that other-regarding prefere...

This paper studies the evolution of both characteristics of reciprocity the willingness to reward friendly behavior and the willingness to punish hostile behavior. Firstly, preferences for rewarding as well as preferences for punishing can survive evolution provided individuals interact within separated groups. This holds even with randomly formed groups and even when individual preferences are...

Donations, Risk Attitudes and Time Preferences: A Study on Altruism in Primary School Children We study with a sample of 1,070 primary school children, aged seven to eleven years, how altruism in a donation experiment is related to children’s risk attitudes and intertemporal choices. Examining such a relationship is motivated by theories of reciprocal altruism that provide a cornerstone to unde...

Experimental evidence indicates that non-monetary considerations influence subjects’ allocation behavior. We investigate the impact of a multigeneration setup on allocation behavior. We modify the traditional dictator game by introducing 3 generations A, B and C. A takes an arbitrary share of a pie and passes the rest to B. B divides the rest of the pie between her and C. We find that this inte...

Emotions, Sanctions and Cooperation We use skin conductance responses and self-reports of hedonic valence to study the emotional basis of cooperation and punishment in a social dilemma. Emotional reaction to free-riding incites individuals to apply sanctions when they are available. The application of sanctions activates a “virtuous emotional circle” that accompanies cooperation. Emotionally ar...

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to isolate the impact of various combinations of the following motives on trustworthiness: (i) unconditional other-regarding preferences — like altruism, inequality aversion, quasi-maximin, etc.; (ii) deal-responsiveness — reacting to actions that allow for a mutual improvement by adopting behavior that implies a mutual improvement; (iii) g...