Wafa Hakim Orman

Religion, Corruption, and the Rule of Law

Existing research has found that economic growth is higher in countries where (1) certain religious beliefs are stronger and (2) the rule of law is stronger and corruption is lower. This paper examines whether religion is correlated with the rule of law and the level of corruption, thereby providing a partial explanation of the correlation between religion and economic growth. We find that the strength of the rule of law and the level of corruption are both associated with a country’s religious heritage, as measured by the country’s largest religious group in 1900. In addition, we find that our results sometimes differ when we control for variables where we lack data for all countries in the sample, but that these differences are attributable to changes in sample composition rather than inclusion of the control variables. Our results suggest that researchers should take great care to distinguish between the effects of adding a control variable and the resulting sample composition effects when doing cross-country analysis.

Giving it Away for Free? The Nature of Job-Market Signaling by Open-Source Software Developers

Much work has been done in recent times to answer the question of why people contribute, and continue to contribute to open-source and free software, despite the lack of immediate financial gain in most cases. Lerner and Tirole (2002) hypothesize that open-source contributions act as a form of job-market signaling they permit prospective employers to judge a persons ability directly. This paper tests the nature of this signaling using a complementarity framework. Do developers use open source software as a way to enhance the signal from a college education, or to substitute for it, in a form of learning by doing? I find evidence that they are complements, while conclusively rejecting the idea that they are substitutes.

Playing with Other People’s Money: Contributions to Public Goods by Trustees

Decisions about the level and allocation of public goods in the real world are frequently made by representatives or trustees, rather than by the contributors themselves. We design and conduct an experiment to test the difference between contributions made by trustees vis-à-vis contributions made with ones own endowment. We explore the patterns of decisions made by subjects in the two games, distinguishing between altruistic and reciprocal actions, and unpacking the potential heterogeneity of other-regarding preferences that motivate the contributions we observe. We find that subjects tend to contribute more when acting as trustees than when they are playing with their own money. Further, and consistent with “warm glow�? theories of altruism, trustees more frequently conditionally contribute more than the rest of the group and unconditionally contribute more than they expect from others.

Does Heterogeneity Help in Overcoming the Public Goods Dilemma in a Sequential Contribution Environment

This paper compares behavior of heterogeneous groups with homogeneous groups in public goods production. In heterogeneous groups members differ in their opportunity costs of contribution, while in homogeneous groups, members have the same opportunity costs. Members of three-player groups sequentially make all-or-nothing contributions towards the production of a public good where contribution decisions, payoffs, and opportunity costs of preceding players in the group are known to each group member. We find that heterogeneous groups perform better than homogeneous groups controlling for average opportunity costs at the group level. Our results also indicate that subjects develop an endogenous contribution norm to sustain public goods production where subjects in the first positions, and subjects with relatively low opportunity costs contribute most often.