Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans (2007)
Zak, Paul J., Stanton, Angela A., Ahmadi, Sheila
Human beings routinely help strangers at costs to themselves. Sometimes the help offered is generous offering more than the other expects. The proximate mechanisms supporting generosity are not...
The Neuroeconomics of Trust (2006)
A possible explanation for the substantial amount of "irrational" behavior observed in markets (and elsewhere) is that humans are a highly social species and to an extent value what other humans...
The Politics of Endogenous Growth
Is it politically feasible for governments to engineer endogenous growth? This paper illustrates two reasonable political decision mechanisms by which fiscal policy generates endogenous growth with a...
This paper introduces an emerging transdisciplinary field known as neuroeconomics. Neuroeconomics uses neuroscientific measurement techniques to investigate how decisions are made. First, I present a...
Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans
Zak, Paul J., Stanton, Angela A., Ahmadi, Sheila
Human beings routinely help strangers at costs to themselves. Sometimes the help offered is generous—offering more than the other expects. The proximate mechanisms supporting generosity are not...
Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans
Zak, Paul J., Stanton, Angela A., Ahmadi, Sheila
Human beings routinely help strangers at costs to themselves. Sometimes the help offered is generous offering more than the other expects. The proximate mechanisms supporting generosity are not...
William D. Casebeer, Paul J. Zak
Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and...
The Neuroeconomics of Distrust: Sex Differences in Behavior and Physiology
Paul J. Zak, Karla Borja, William T. Matzner, Robert Kurzban
Political Risk and Capital Flight
The Rule of One-Third guaranteed wives one-third of their husband's estate upon marital dissolution through death or divorce. We document the historical ubiquity of this legal construct and show that...
Genetics, Family Structure, and Economic Growth
Recent biomedical research shows that roughly three-quarters of cognitive abilities are attributable to genetics and family environment. This paper presents a theory of growth in which human capital...
Population Genetics and Economic Growth
This paper builds an age-structural model of human population genetics in which agents are endowed with a high-dimensional genome that determines their cognitive and physical characteristics. Young...
Growth of Government And The Politics of Fiscal Policy
U.S. government expenditures increased rapidly during the post-war period, then slowed in the 1980s and began falling in 1992. To examine the dynamics of the growth and subsequent reduction in...
Endogenous Growth Through Government Policy
This paper illustrates two reasonable political decision mechanisms by which fiscal policy generates endogenous growth under a constant returns to scale production technology, absent externalities....
Political Risk and Capital Flight
Capital flight often amounts to a substantial proportion of GDP when developing countries face crises. This paper presents a portfolio choice model that relates capital flight to rate of return...
What Accounts for the Emergence of Malthusian Fertility in Transition Economies?
The transition to market-oriented economies in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, like the Great Depression in the U.S. and Germany in the 1930s, generated sharp...
Why does trust vary so substantially across countries? This paper presents a general equilibrium growth model in which heterogeneous agents transact and face a moral hazard problem. Agents may trust...
Optimal Fiscal Policy in an Economy Facing Sociopolitical Instability
Chetan Ghate, Quan Vu Le, Paul J. Zak
The paper presents a model of optimal government policy when policy choices may exacerbate sociopolitical instability (SPI). The authors show that optimal policy that takes into account SPI...
The traditional view in economics is that individuals respond to incentives, but absent strong incentives to the contrary selfishness prevails. Moreover, this “greed is good” approach is deemed...
The Choice of Institutions: The Role of Risk and Risk-Aversion
Institutions can affect individual behavior both via their efficiency impact and via their risk reducing mechanisms. However there has been little study of the relative importance of these two...
Kaleckian Lags in General Equilibrium
The relationship between production lags and business cycles has a long history in economics, but was first analyzed rigorously by Michal Kalecki in 1935. In a linear delay differential equation...
A dynamic general equilibrium model of larceny – or property crime – is presented in which both economic conditions and government policies affect the commission calculus. The model provides a...
Genetics, family structure, and economic growth
Recent biomedical research shows that roughly three-quarters of cognitive abilities are attributable to genetics and family environment. This paper presents a growth model that characterizes the role...
We analyze the dynamics of a simple growth model in which production occurs with a delay while new capital is installed (time-to-build). The time-to-build technology is shown to yield a system of...
The Rule of One-Third guaranteed wives a life interest in one-third of their husband's estate upon marital dissolution. We document the ubiquity of this legal construct and demonstrate that...
Optimal Fiscal Policy in an Economy Facing Socio-Political Instability
Chetan Ghate, Quan Vu Le, Paul J. Zak
We present a model of optimal government policy when policy choices may exacerbate socio-political instability (SPI). We show that optimal policy that takes into account SPI transforms a standard...
Institutions, Property Rights and Growth
This paper presents a growth model in which property rights are insecure and costly to enforce. Losses of property provide the impetus to establish institutions which seek to enforce property rights....