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Virtual Life Satisfaction

We study life satisfaction data from the 2005 World Values Survey and a 2009 survey of users of the virtual world Second Life. Second Life users do not have the same demographic profile as the general population, but the differences are not as large as we expected. The mechanisms and causes of life satisfaction seem to be similar in the two samples. Among Second Life users, satisfaction with their ...

Spillovers of Institutional Change in Africa

While previous research has looked at the determinants of the quality of institutions, not much research has been done that looks at the determinants of institutional change. This paper examines what determines the probability of an improvement in political freedoms. Several path-dependent variables, such as the history of political freedom, are clearly influential. In addition to that, economic openness ...

Locational Conditions and Firm Performance: Introduction to the Special Issue

Culture, Contiguity and Conflict: On the Measurement of Ethnolinguistic Effects in Spatial Spillovers

Research on ethnolinguistic heterogeneity has so far mostly focused on domestic measures, while little attention has been paid to ethnolinguistic relations between nations. In this paper, I propose a way of measuring ethnolinguistic affinity between nations. This index measures the degree of similarity two randomly drawn individuals from two different populations are expected to display. I show that ...

Preferences for Childcare Policies: Theory and Evidence

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from rich to poor, the rich should favour mixed over pure public provision, but if public provision redistributes ...

How Do Tourists React to Political Violence? An Empirical Analysis of Tourism in Egypt

This paper uses a detailed database of political violence in Egypt to study European and US tourists' attitudes towards a conflict region. We study the heterogeneous impacts of different dimensions of political violence and counter-violence on tourist flows to Egypt in the 1990s. Both US and EU tourists respond negatively to attacks on tourists, but are not influenced by casualties arising in confrontations ...

Security as a Public, Private or Club Good: Some Fundamental Considerations

Security is often defined as the absence of threats. However, security has far more aspects, reaching from security of nation states to health security. Baldwin (1997) formulated seven questions to narrow the (broad) concept of security. Along with Baldwin's questions, this paper analyses 'security' in the context of private, public, and club goods and their changing mixture. On the individual level, ...

The Economics of Terrorism from a Policy-Maker's Perspective

This paper introduces a brief framework on the political decision-making process in the context of terrorism. I relate the trade-offs policy-makers are faced with to the economic terrorism literature. Past years have shown a steady increase in theoretical and empirical contributions. However, the major part of the empirical advances is on the economic effects of terrorism, its origins, and drivers. ...

The Economics of Security: A European Perspective ; Introduction

Terrorism Risk Concern in Europe

Motivated by the Bayesian framework, we explore terrorism risk perception differences across European countries. Perception variation is explained by the long-term terrorism countries face, while the cyclical part of terrorism does not seem to play any role.