The objective of this article is to explain populist attitudes that are prevailing in a number European democracies. Populist usually lead social protests and votes. We capture the wave by relying on values traditionally viewed as populist—such distrust institutions neighbors, rejection migrations, strong preferences for law order—rather than voting behavior. Our study covers period 2004–2018 2...

Two standard schemes for awarding a prize have been examined in the literature. The prize is awarded (πD) deterministically: to the contestant with the highest output; (πP ) probabilistically: to all contestants, with probabilities proportional to their outputs. Our main result is that if there is suffi cient diversity in contestants’skills, and not too much noise on output, then πP will elicit...

This paper analyzes the impact of carbon taxes on the Japanese economy using an applied/computable general equilibrium model. This analysis sheds light on both the efficiency and the equity issues of these policies. The study shows that some alleviation measures, e.g. tax differentiation, might be required to ease the damages caused to energy intensive industries. Moreover, considering the regr...

Endogenous Leadership: Selection and Influence In social dilemmas, leading a team by making heroic efforts may prove costly, especially if the followers are not adequately motivated to make similar sacrifices. Attempting to understand what motivates these seemingly selfless individuals to lead, we report the results of a two-stage public good experiment with endogenous timing. Even though it tu...

Recent theoretical progress on inequity has left unresolved the crucial question of what constitutes equity. This paper proposes a positive theory of distributive justice, in a framework of inequity aversion, that depends on three general justice principles and context. The current study challenges the view of many previous inquiries that justice is context-specific and instead advances a theor...

This paper shows that identical offers in an ultimatum game generate systematically different rejection rates depending on the other offers that are available to the proposer. This result casts doubt on the consequentialist practice in economics to define the utility of an action solely in terms of the consequences of the action irrespective of the set of alternatives. It means, in particular, ...

For a social code of conduct to gain universal acceptance in a society, it would have to satisfy minimum requirements of consistency and procedural justice. The so-called universalizability principle in ethics says that any moral judgement made for an action of a person in a situation should be universalizable to other persons’ actions in situations that are identical in relevant respects. By a...

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...

A central question in human development is what causes health inequalities over the life cycle. We link a harsh environment in the teen years to individuals’ health conditions almost 40 years later, and employ Regression Discontinuity Design to make a causal inference between adolescent adversity and long-term health. Specifically, we exploit the mandatory “send-down” policy during China’s Cult...

This paper characterizes a stationary Markov-perfect political equilibrium where agents vote over income taxation that distorts educational investment. Agents become rich or poor through educational investment, and the poor have a second chance at success. The results show the following concerning the cost of a second chance. First, when the cost is low, the economy is characterized by high lev...