Archive

2021

The institution of a single CEO (Chief Executive Officer) has significant weaknesses.The CEO’s interests diverge from those of the owners and their representants as well as other top managers. Assigning so much power to a single person is r…
Nowadays, academic journals of high standing rarely accepta conceptual idea in a paper not instantly accompanied by econometric estimates. The idea would almost certainly get rejected. Empirical validation based on past statistical data has…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
The field of behavioral taxation dates back at least to the 1950s. In this contribution I willexplore the opportunities and challenges in the area, with a particular focus on tax compliance. I will focus on the data required to make further…
Authors: Torgler Benno
Despite a solid foundation of women’s career progression research, the role of personality andpsychosocial characteristics in explaining objective career success is not yet fully understood. Structural underrepresentation of female execut…
This paper begins with a discussion on James Buchanan’s suggestion to replace theword “economics” with “symbiotics”, viewing human behavior through the window of exchange rather than choice. Although our current textbooks – such…
Authors: Torgler Benno
In this paper I discuss how Law and Economics can benefit from incorporatingsome insights from Public Choice into their analyses. Within this argument, I examine the evolution of experimental methods by looking at laboratory, field, and nat…
Authors: Torgler Benno

2020

Trust in the health care system requires being confident that suffic ient and appropriatetreatments will be provided if needed. The CO VID-19 public health crisis is a significant, global, and (mostly) simultaneous test of the behav ioral i…
In the midst of the COVID‐19 pandemic currently affecting every corner of the globe, there is a critical need for understanding and mapping human movement in order to formulateappropriate scientific and policy responses. To this end, we p…

2019

2018

2017

There is a fundamental difference between the natural and the social sciences due toreactivity. This difference remains even in the age of Artificially Intelligent Learning Machines and Big Data. Many academic economists take it as a matter…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
The digital revolution has led to a quantification of ever more areas of human life and society. At thesame time, there is an explosion of the number of awards , which by their very nature are based on non- quantified performance. Will quan…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
In this contribution, we first discuss how the analysis of self-reported measures ofsubjective well-being can contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which public choices serve individuals’ preferences. Our research insights…
Usually, studies analyzing terrorism focus on the total number ofcasualties or attacks in a given county. However, per capita rates of terrorism are more likely to matter for individual welfare. Analyzing 214 countries from 1970-2014, we sh…

2016

For about 45 years, vote and popularity functions have been estimated for many countries indi-cating that voting intentions as well as actual votes are influenced by economic development. The economy is, of course, not the only and probably…
Rechnungshöfe spielen eine zentrale Rolle in der Demokratie. Im Verbundmit Informations- und Offenlegungspflichten bilden sie das Rückgrat einer transparenten Staatsführung. Um die Aufsichtsrolle wahrzunehmen, ist eine institutionelle Ve…
Authors: Schelker Mark

2015

This paper discusses several problems of direct popular decisions. In the first part, we consid-er problems related to the functioning of direct democracy. As a political system it only makes sense if there exists a continuous process and n…

2014

This study investigates the determinants of economists’ life satisfaction. The analysis isbased on a survey of professional, mostly academic economists from European countries and beyond. We find that certain features of economists’ pro…
First the assumption of self-interest as applied in Economics is presented. Here we also discuss areasin which (many) people behave less self- but more other-regarding than traditional economic models assume. Then, greedy behaviour is consi…
Forecasters’ estimates influence peoples’ expectations, their decisions and thus also actual market outcomes. Such reactivity to forecasts induces externalities whichharm the ex-post assessment of the forecasters’ accuracy and in turn…
Historically, tax compliance has been a highly interdisciplinary avenue ofresearch to which economics, psychology, law, sociology, history, political science, and accountancy have made valuable contributions. It is less well understood, how…
Authors: Torgler Benno
Awards appear in various forms, ranging from the title «Employee of theMonth» to prizes, decorations, and other honors. This contribution develops a theory designed to analyze the widely-observed phenomenon of award giving. We use signaling…

2013

2012

2011

The paper reports on work values in Europe. At the country levelwe find that job satisfaction is related to lower working hours, higher well-being, and a higher GDP per capita. Moving to the micro level, we turn our attention from job satis…
Authors: Torgler Benno
Research rankings based on publications and citations today dominategovernance of academia. Yet they have unintended side effects on individual scholars and academic institutions and can be counterproductive. They induce a substitution of t…
Using information collected from American Economic Review publicationsof the last 100 years, we try to provide answers to various questions: Which are the top AER publishing institutions and countries? Which are the top AER papers based on …

2010

Awards are widespread in all countries and are prevalent both in the public sphere and in theprivate sector. This paper argues, and empirically supports, that awards serve public functions and economists should take them seriously. Using a …
Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causalforces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of «university»,…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
The current debt crisis in many OECD countries calls for adequate strategies in budget consolidation.To regain fiscal solvency many governments base their fiscal adjustments at least partly on spending cuts. A common political claim is that…
The UNESCO World Heritage List contains the 900 most treasured Sites of humanity?sculture and landscapes. The World Heritage List is beneficial where heritage sites are undetected, disregarded by national decision-makers, not commercially e…
In this study we explore in detail the causes of corruption in China using two different sets of data atthe regional level (provinces and cities). We observe that regions with more anti-corruption efforts, histories of British rule, higher …
Academic rankings today are the backbone of research governance, which seem to fit theaims of «new public management» on the one side and the idea of the «republic of science» on the other side. Nevertheless rankings recently came under scr…
Awards – widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere – are motivators that derivetheir value from non-pecuniary concerns such as status and self-image. Quasi-experimental panel data from the call center of a large international bank al…

2009

Academic economists today are caught in a «Publication ImpossibilityTheorem System» or PITS. In order to further their careers, they are required to publish in A-journals, but for the vast majority this is impossible because there are few s…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
Public Auditors are fundamental institutions to supervise government agents. Withoutaccurate information principals would find it hard to make adequate decisions. Since agents face strong incentives to misreport, competent audits of financi…
Authors: Schelker Mark
There is a basic tension between the principle of democracy and the rule of law. This becomesobvious whenever the Swiss citizens accept an initiative that is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. First, we discuss the t…
This paper argues that the ?Economics of Crime? concentrates too much on punishment as a policy to fight crime, which is unwise for several reasons. There are important instances in which punishment simply cannot reduce crime. Several feasi…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
In economics there is presently an almost revolutionary development. The direct measurement of subjective welfare challenges traditional economics, inspires it, and opens new avenues for scientific research. The approaches and possibilities…
Behavioral economics documents the importance of status and self-image concerns in the workplace, but is largely silent about how to instrumentalize them to induce effort. Awards|widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere are motivato…
Academic economists today are caught in a ?Publication Impossibility Theorem System? or PITS. To further their careers, they are required to publish in A-journals, but this is impossible for the vast majority because there are few slots ope…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.

2008

Non-monetary incentives in the form of awards have so far escaped the attention of economists despite their widespread use. This paper presents an experiment conducted online at IBM to assess the impact of these kinds of extrinsic incentive…
We argue that the decision to bribe bureaucrats depends on the frequency of corruption within a society. We provide a behavioral model to explain this conduct: engaging in corruption results in a disutility of guilt. This implies that peopl…
In the course of history, a large number of politicians have been assassinated. Rational choice hypotheses are developed and tested using panel data covering more than 100 countries over a period of 20 years. Several strategies, in addition…
Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and countries, and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. We argue that such rankings do not effectively measure …
Die Benediktinerklöster weisen im Vergleich zu anderen Institutionen eine ungewöhnlich lange Lebensdauer auf. Unsere empirische Untersuchung aller je existierenden Benediktinerabteien in Bayern, Baden-Württemberg und der Deutschschweiz z…
Public auditors should reduce agency problems and improve transparency. We address the question of whether auditors should be elected by the citizens or appointed by either the legislature or the executive, and explore the influence of cond…
Authors: Schelker Mark

2007

Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in politics and in rational choice analyses of terrorism. However, there are two strategies that are superior to deterrence. The first one is to make terrorist attacks less d…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost t…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.

2006

Cross-disciplinary ?happiness research? has made big progress in the measurement of individual welfare. This development makes it tempting to pursue the old dream of maximizing aggregate happiness as a social welfare function. However, we p…
?Evaluitis? – i.e. ex post assessments of organizations and persons – has become a rapidly spreading disease. In addition to the well-known costs imposed on evaluees and evaluators, additional significant costs are commonly…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
This chapter discusses the role of environmental morale and environmental motivation in individual behavior from the point of view of economics and psychology. It deals with the fundamental public good problem, and presents empirical (labor…
Why so many people pay their taxes, although fines and audit probability are low, has become a central question in the tax compliance literature. A homo economicus, with a more refined motivation structure, helps us to shed light on this pu…

2005

To overcome problems produced by globalization, some people see the solution in a World Government while others see it in an autarchic global market without any government intervention. Both solutions are rejected due to their major shortco…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.
ax morale has received a growing attention in academics as well as in public life. The relevance of tax morale for fiscal policy cannot be neglected as tax morale can help to explain the level of tax compliance or tax evasion. This paper gi…
Awards in the form of orders, medals, decorations and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, economists have disregarded this kind of non-material ex…
Authors: Frey Bruno S.

2004

In recent years the topic of corruption has attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of corruption. This empirical study analyses a cross-section of individ…
Why so many people pay their taxes, although fines and audit probability are low, has become a central question in the tax compliance literature. Concepts of Homo Economicus, endowed with a more refined motivation structure, help to shed li…
This paper intends to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and in which interesting directions it might develop. First, the current state of the research on happiness in economics is briefly discussed. We…
This paper examines whether trust is an investment decision under uncertainty, based on the expectation of trustworthiness, and whether trustworthiness is reciprocity, conditional on one?s counterpart?s behavior. In trust experiments in Rus…
This paper analyses tax morale in several Asian countries. The descriptive analysis indicates that tax morale is very low in the Philippines and relatively high in Japan, China, and Bangladesh. In general Asia has a higher tax morale than O…
Authors: Torgler Benno

2003

This paper has a novel framework analysing what shapes superstition in a multivariate analysis. The results indicate that socio-demographic and socio-economic variables matter. The results also indicate that there is a certain concurrence b…
Authors: Torgler Benno
This paper analyses the impact of direct democracy, trust in government, the court and the legal system, and federalism on tax morale. In the tax compliance literature it is novel to analyse tax morale as dependent variable and to systemati…
Authors: Torgler Benno
The intention of this paper is to analyze religiosity as a factor that potentially affects tax morale. For this purpose, a multivariate analysis has been done with data from the World Values Survey 1995- 1997, covering more than thirty coun…
Authors: Torgler Benno

2002