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Abstract: Although superstition is a common phenomenon in our modern society, only a few studies have explored empirically on what it depends. This paper investigates the factors which determine superstition, reporting some preliminary empirical results. The findings indicate that socio-demographic and socio-economic conditions matter. There seems to be a certain concurrence between churches and superstitious beliefs, the correlation between superstition and attendance of church and other religious activities being mostly negative. On the other hand, an overall greater religiosity increases superstition. The results also indicate that there is a strong variance in superstition in different countries. People from formerly Communist countries show a particularly high degree of superstition. It could therefore be concluded that superstition substituted the religious beliefs and activities eradicated during the Communist era. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Tax evasion seems to be a growing problem in almost all countries. The paper analyses the possibilities and limitations of game-theoretical aspects to analyse tax evasion. However, empirical findings indicate that most people pay more taxes than the traditional economic approach would predict. Thus, it might be important to go a step back and analyse tax morale, the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, as endogenous variable. With data from the World Values Survey (WVS), choosing Canada, strong evidence has been found that trust in government, pride, and religiosity have a systematic positive influence on tax morale. This effect tends to persist even after controlling for age, income, education, gender, marital status, employment status. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the spirit of previous work in the compliance literature (e.g., tax, littering), we investigate whether environmental social norms affect volunteering in environmental organizations. Using two ‘environmental morale’ variables as indirect measures, we analyze the impact of social norms on the incidence of unpaid work in environmental organizations. In addition, we test whether violation of a specific environmental norm initiates a conditional cooperation response. We explore a large individual data set covering 32 countries from both Western and Eastern Europe, and extend the number of countries investigated to test the robustness of the relationship at the macro level. Our results indicate a strong positive relationship between the proxies for environmental social norms and volunteering in environmental organizations. The relationship persists despite our various robustness checks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]