infonet-economy

This paper explores what determines the survival of people in a life-and-death situation. The sinking of the Titanic allows us to inquire whether pro-social behavior matters in such extreme situations. This event can be considered a quasi-natural experiment. The empirical results suggest that social norms such as ‘women and children first’ persevered during such an event. Women of...

Posner`s (2010) analysis offers many exciting insights into the principal-agent problem, particularly with respect to the secret service. I argue that it would be useful to consider a broader model of human behaviour, which includes awards as extrinsic incentives beyond pay, as well as intrinsic motivation. A more comparative stance that goes beyond the United States would be a...

Lin Ostrom’s work constitutes a great step forward in the analysis of social governance. Instead of focusing on the technical characteristics of goods she studies what types of institutions have emerged and how they affect individual motivation and behavior in public goods and commons situations. Her approach represents a careful analysis of institutions often emerging from below....

This survey intends to portray the two main approaches of economic research on religion. The first investigates the impact of religion on the economy. Religion and the internalized value system are found to influence economic attitudes output in a favorable way. The second approach is to explain religious behavior with economic models showing how an individual can derive utility from...

Measuring individual welfare using data on reported subjective well-being has made great progress. It offers a new way of confronting public choice hypotheses with field
data, e.g. with respect to partisan preferences on unemployment and inflation or rents in the public bureaucracy. Insights from public choice also help to assess the role of happiness measures in public policy...

Ein Weltstaat ist nicht nur eine schwer zu erreichende Utopie, sondern wegen seiner extremen Monopolmacht gegenüber den Individuen, der Ineffizienz und der Verteilungsungerechtigkeit auch unerwünscht. Ebenso ist eine Anarchie einer globalen Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ohne Staatsinterventionen völlig unrealistisch und weist ernst zu nehmende Mängel auf. Eine zukünftige Weltordnung...

Wie glücklich Menschen sich fühlen, wird mit Hilfe von repräsentativen Umfragen erfasst. Wichtigste Determinanten sind gute Gesundheit und soziale Beziehungen. Personen mit höherem Einkommen fühlen sich glücklicher. Allerdings führt eine Einkommenssteigerung nur vor- übergehend zu mehr Lebenszufriedenheit; Menschen gewöhnen sich an ein höheres Einkommen und vergleichen sich mit...