Trust in International Organizations: An Empirical Investigation Focusing on the United Nations

The literature on social capital has strongly increased in the last two decades, but there still is a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of international trust. This empirical study analyses a cross-section of individuals, using micro-data from the World Values Survey, covering 38 countries, to investigate trust in international organizations, specifically in the United Nations. In line with previous studies on international trust we find that political trust matters. We also find that social trust is relevant, but contrary to previous studies the results are less robust. Moreover, the paper goes beyond previous studies investigating also the impact of geographic identification, corruption and globalization. We find that a higher level of (perceived) corruption reduces the trust in the UN in developed countries, but increases trust in developing and transition countries. A stronger identification with the world as a whole also leads to a higher trust in the UN and a stronger capacity to act globally in economic and political environment increases trust in the UN.International Organizations, United Nations, International Trust, Political Trust, Social Trust, Corruption, Globalization

The Impact of Direct Democracy and Local Autonomy on Tax Morale in Switzerland

This paper analyses the impact of direct democracy and local autonomy on tax morale and the size of the shadow economy. We use two different data sets on tax morale at the individual level (World Values Survey and International Social Survey Programme) and the macro data of the size of the shadow economy to systematically analyse the effects of institutions in Switzerland, a country where participation rights and the degree of federalism vary across different cantons. The findings suggest that direct democratic rights and local autonomy, have a significantly positive effect on tax morale and the size of the shadow economy.Tax Morale, Shadow Economy, Tax Compliance, Tax Evasion, Direct Democracy, LocalAutonomy

Comment on “The Spreading of Disorderâ€

Keizer et al. (2008) explore disorderly settings linked to a process of spreading norm violation. The results show that if norm violating behavior becomes more common, it negatively affects compliance in other areas. This comment addresses problematic areas in their studies and provides new empirical evidence of a cross-norm inhibition effect that deals with such criticism.disorder, broken windows theory, pro-social behavior, contagion effect.

Historical Excellence' in Soccer World Cup Tournaments: Empirical Evidence with Data from 1930 to 2002

Introduction – 1. Setting an empirical model to measure WorldCup soccer success – 2. Overview and discussion of the empiricalresults - 3. Summary of the results and some concluding remarks

Economics of Sports: A Note to this Special Issue

The expansion of economics to other spheres of life, including politics, war, crime, religion, or in particular sports can be seen in line with Hirshleifer (2002) as a breath of fresh air in economics. Although one can always criticize the generalizability of results developed with sports data, sporting events can still be seen as economic (miniature) environments. There is no reason not to acknowledge that athletes, for example, behave according to two key elements in economics, namely incentives and constraints. Focal economic concepts such as prices, opportunity costs or property rights can be nicely investigated in sports markets and are supposed to drive the behaviour of their key actors. An essential strength of sports events is the fact that they take place in a controlled environment generating therefore outcomes that come very close to holding other things equal, providing therefore a real-world laboratory for testing economic theories. Researchers have the chance of working with highly reliable data (low variable errors) and reduced omitted variables biases. The advantages can be visualized using the Tour de France as an example. The ranking of a cyclist at the Tour de France, his performance in the mountains or the time trials are clearly observable and are free of discrepancies compared to well known and often used traditional economic variables such as GDP or CPI. Statistics can be adjusted based on the outside conditions (stadium, weather conditions etc.). A Tour de France takes place in a controlled environment. All riders perform in the same terrain at the same time with the same outside restrictions such as the weather. Further external influences are controlled by the rules (law) of the event, as they are the same for all riders. Thus, many factors can be held constant and therefore the situation is much like a controlled environment. Even though a cycling event allows social and economic interactions and is thus less controlled than a laboratory experiment one of the main advantages is that the participation evokes actual and real processes (e.g., strong monetary incentives) in an environment outside a laboratory setting (Goff and Tollison 1990).doping; economics of sport; illegal activities

Tax morale, eastern Europe and European enlargement

This study tries to remedy the current lack of tax compliance research analyzing tax morale in 10 Eastern European countries that joined the European Union in 2004 or 2007. By exploring tax morale differences between 1999 and 2008, it shows that tax morale has decreased in 7 out of 10 Eastern European countries. This lack of sustainability may support the incentive based conditionality hypothesis that the European Union only has a limited ability to influence tax morale over time. The author observes that events and processes at the country level are crucial to understanding tax morale. Factors such as perceived government quality and trust in the justice system and the government are positively correlated with tax morale in 2008.Taxation&Subsidies,Debt Markets,Subnational Economic Development,Emerging Markets,National Governance

The impact of tax morale and institutional quality on the shadow economy

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries’ institutional quality affect the shadow economy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the level and changes of shadow economy. Relatively new available data sources offer the unique opportunity to shed more light in the understanding of a topic that has received an increased attention. We find strong support that a higher tax morale and a higher institutional quality lead to a smaller shadow economy.Shadow economy; tax morale; institutional quality; government intervention; corruption

Religion and economy: a comment

McCleary and Barro (2006) analyse whether Max Weber was right in emphasizing the religious impact on work ethic. They find a positive correlation between belief in hell and work ethic (p=0.098). They conclude that “Weber may have been right in emphasizing the religion link with work ethic†(p. 71). However, they fail to explore link to Max Weber's work on Protestant ethic as they don't explore for denomination differences. Weber's hypothesis would suggest that we would mainly observe an effect for Protestantism. Using a similar data set we provide empirical evidence that indicates that the impact of religion on work ethic is affected by the level of Protestantism within a society. Thus, compared to McCleary and Barro's finding such a result is very much in line with Max Weber's link between religion and work ethic.RELIGION, WORK ETHIC, PROTESTANTISM

Social Capital and Relative Income Concerns: Evidence from 26 Countries

Research on the effects of positional concerns on individuals’ attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, using the International Social Survey Programme 1998 data on 25’000 individuals from 26 countries this paper investigates the impact of relative income position on facets of social capital, covering horizontal and vertical trust as well as norm compliance. Testing relative deprivation theory, we identify a deleterious positional income effect for persons below the reference income, the absolute size of which far outweighs that of relative income advantage. In contrast, social capital rises in absolute income, while distributional fairness perceptions partially mediate relative income effects.Relative income, positional concerns, social capital, social norms, deprivation theory

The Consequences of Corruption: Evidence from China

With complementary Chinese data sets and alternative corruption measures, we explore the consequences of corruption. Adopting a novel approach we provide evidence that corruption can have both, positive and negative effects, on economic development. The overall impact of corruption might be the balance of the two simultaneous effects within a specific institutional environment (“grease the wheels” and “sand the wheels”). Corruption is observed to considerably increase income inequality in China. We also find that corruption strongly reduces tax revenue. Looking at things from an expenditure point of view we observe that corruption significantly decreases government spending on education, R&D and public health in China. We also observe that regional corruption significantly reduces inbound foreign direct investment in Chinese regions, which indicates that the pollution haven hypothesis may not hold in China. This finding sheds a new light on the “China puzzle” that China is the largest developing host of FDI while it is appears to be very corrupt. Finally we observe that corruption substantially aggravates pollution probably through loosening environment regulation, and that it modifies the effects of trade openness and FDI on the stringency of environmental policy in a manner opposite to that observed in literature to date.Corruption, China, Government, Economic Development, Inequality, Environment