Archive

Am Beispiel der Schweizer Justizinitiative zeigen wir auf, dass eine qualifizierte Losauswahlkeineswegs irrational ist, sondern zu ei ner Rationalität auf einer übergeordneten, institutionellen Ebene führen kann. Sie erhöht die Wahrsche…

We investigate the effect of rising temperatures on economic development, using sub-national data for approximately 1,500 sub-national regions in 81 countries from the 1950s to the 2010s. Accounting for region- and time-fixed factors by mea…

Die starke Reduktion der Gemeinden im Kanton Glarus, die 2006 an der Landsgemeinde beschlossen wurde, hat nur geringfügige finanzielle Auswirkungengebracht. Hingegen ist die Stimmbeteiligung – ein wichtiger Indikator für die Beziehung d…

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…

This paper presents a proposal to deal with cultural overtourismcausing substantial negative effects. They burden the local population, tourists, and the natural environment by overcrowding, vandalism, and pollution. While at present touris…

We contribute to the happiness literature by analyzing the causal relationshipbetween sports and happiness. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio- Economic Panel (GSOEP), we find a positive correlation between sports participa- tion…

The history of AI in economics is long and winding, much the same as theevolving field of AI itself. Economists have engaged with AI since its beginnings, albeit in varying degrees and with changing focus across time and places. In this stu…

As artificial intelligence (AI) thrives and propagates through modern life, a keyquestion to ask is how to include humans in future AI? Despite human-involvement at every stage of the pr oduction process from conception and design through t…

The ambiguous phenomenon of corruption has long b een the cause of great theoretical debate ineconomics. By using Structural Equation Modelling, with the two types of corruption as a latent variable, this paper employs causal and indicative…

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…

The empirical question of voting preferences and how these may change (swing) is yet to beanswered, as there is little first-hand microeconomic evidence on swing voting. We focus on the interactions between voters’ age and political cynic…

Although understanding how multiculturalism shapes society is imperative in today’s globalized world, insights on certain behavior domains remain limited, including those on taxcompliance among domestic versus foreign taxpayers. Our meta-st…

We investigate geo-referenced household-level data consisting of up to 206,896 individuals living in 21,826 localities across 28 sub-Saharan African countries over 20 years. We analyse the relevance of coastal proximity as a predictor of in…

In this chapter, we ask (conceptually and methodologically) what exactly isbehavioural economics and what are its roots? And further, what may we have missed along the way? We argue that revisiting “classical” behavioural economics conc…

Sporting events can be seen as controlled, real-world, miniature laboratory environments, approaching the idea of “holding other things equal” when exploring the implications of decisions, incentives, and constraints in a competitive se…

Corruption literature within economics has long returned ambiguous results with no concisecause or impact of corruption identified. This meta-analysis aims to find synergy within the corruption literature by assessing macroeconomic empirica…

Self-confidence has long been regarded as one of the key qualities in determining entrepreneurialsuccess. In markets with uncertainty, like crowdfunding, entrepreneurial confidence is an important signal that lowers the information imbalanc…

AI and Big Data provide opportunities and challenges with respect to howwe achieve safety in livable smart cities. In this contribution, we look at set of aspects that are important at the city level; namely, how urban analytics and digital…

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…

Despite the great promises and potential of quantum computing, the fullrange of possibilities and practical applications is not yet clear. In this contribution, we highlight the potential for quantum theories and computation to reignite the…

As the severity and frequency of natural disasters become more pronounced withclimate change and the increased habitation of at-risk areas, it is important to understand people’s resilience to them. We quantify resilience by estimating ho…

The QAnon conspiracy theory contends, among other things, that COVID-19 is a conspiracyorchestrated by powerful actors and aimed at repressing civil liberties. We hypothesize that, where government risk communication started early, as measu…

The recent acceleration and ongoing development in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its related (and/orenabling) digital technologies presents new challenges and considerable opportunity on which businesses and individuals may capitalise. I…

Beauty has been used as a fast and frugal heuristic, and therefore an important determinantof choice, as highlighted in research by Hamermesh. In a world of asymmetric information, beauty represents a proxy for objective characteristics or …

Despite the potential importance of awards as a possible career catalyst, the theoretical andempirical research on awards is still in its infancy. Here, we address this notable shortcoming in the economic literature by exploring data from G…

The challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted scientists from different fields to evaluate whether the use of immunity certificates would allow for a safer and faster return to normality. This policy has been recently implemen…

This paper reports on a laboratory experiment designed specifically to test the influence of nationalpride on tax honesty while using a physiological marker to observe emotional responses to patriotic priming. Participants were exposed to o…

For football executives, understanding the determinants of spectator no-showbehavior better is of utmost importance. Recent research efforts, however, have primarily focused on exploring the potential effects of determinants that the club m…

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, there is an increased interest to understand how social inequalities, discrimination, and inclusion are related to the pandemic. Sub-Saharan Africa has been comparatively resilient regarding the nu…

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…

We designed and implemented a survey to capture what scientists from around the world think about immunity certification. Responses from 12,738 scientists were captured and their distribution was tabulated by participants in health science …

We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentiallycompeting social identities to understand how group identification and socialization affect in- group favoritism and out-group discrimination. T…

Increasing the tax compliance of self-employed business owners (particularly of trade-specific service providers) remains an ongoing challenge for tax authorities. From a compliance point of view, cash transactions are particularly problema…

Women remain underrepresented at the upper echelons. An aversion to competition has beensuggested as a factor that discourages women from applying for top jobs. This paper reviews the research showing that high-ability females compete less …

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constitu…

Because no-show behavior typically leads to operational inefficiencies and thus diminishingreturns for service firms, a growing number of authors have demonstrated the potential of using reminders to reduce no-show rates. In this study, by …

In this contribution, we highlight the potential for quantum theories toreignite the art and science of expert systems and knowledge engineering. With their fundamental grounding in uncertainty and unpredictability, quantum concepts are abl…

In this paper, we show that the right to determine the sequence of moves in a dynamic teamtournament improves the chances of winning the contest. Because studying dynamic team tournaments – like R&D races – with interim feedback is diff…

Broadening democracy by lowering the voting age is on the politicalagenda in many democratic societies. Previous suffrage extensions suggest that there are systematic differences between what parliaments decide and what voters want with res…

The current coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching global effects on thehealth and wellbeing of individuals across each and every continent of the world. The economic and financial market response has been equally disastrous and turbulen…

Because the use of p-values in statistical inference often involves the rejection of a hypothesis on thebasis of a number that itself assumes the hypothesis to be true, many in the scientific community argue that inference should instead be…

In this article, we argue for application of the Human Factors Analysis and ClassificationSystem (HFACS) to proactive incidence prevention in the public health system response to COVID-19. HFACS is a framework of causal categories of human …

This paper examines the effects of globalisation on the pace of governments implementing internationaltravel restrictions during the recent coronavirus pandemic. We find that more globalised countries experienced a longer delay in implement…

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 March 2020, the second ballot of local elections in the German state of Bavaria was held under an official state of emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Bavarian mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Bet…

Pandemics and the reactions to pandemics increase the general problem of scarcity.Scarcity induced trade-offs are particularly relevant for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa as (1) the region suffers from numerous other diseases whose death t…

The current COVID-19 pandemic is a global exogenous shock, impactingindividuals’ decision making and behavi our allowing researchers to test theories of personality by exploring how traits, in conjunction with individual and societal diff…

Although science has been an incredibly pow erful and revolutionary force, it is notclear whether science is suited to perf ormance under pressure; generally, science achieves best in its usual comfort zone of patience, caution, and slownes…

Behavioural responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalization risksthan they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioural responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our resul…

Today’s world is characterized by globalization and international mobility,yet most democratic participation rights are still tied to traditional forms of citizenship. As a consequence, non-citizen are the largest group without franchise. W…

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…

A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it alsogenerates impacts that are worth understan ding from a societal, historical, and cultural perspective. In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spr…

The literature suggests that the household invests in the human capital of a child member notonly for altruistic reasons but also as insurance against future income shocks. Hence, the allocation of the child’s time between school and work…

We study the effect of temperature on economic development on the sub-national level, employing cross-sectional data for up to 15,533 sub-national units from two distinct sources. In contrast to the existing cross-country literature on the …

Universal suffrage is a core element for the functioning of democracy. However,with growing international mobility, an increasing share of the resident population has no suffrage. This paper analyzes the conditions under which domestic citi…

We propose a radically new approach to deal with major negative effects resulting fromovertourism. The major attractions of heavily visited historical sites are to be identically replicated in a new location emphasizing a vivid historical e…

This paper investigates the impact of improved water provision on individual health outcomes in rural Uganda. We merge household and individual panel datasets with sub-county level administrative data on water supply projects. Our approach …

We present a new micro-based approach to evaluate the effect of water- and health-related developmentprojects. We collect information from 1.8 million individuals from DHS clusters (Demographic and Health Surveys) in 38 developing economies…

Electoral district magnitude varies across German electoral constituencies and overlegislative periods due to Germany’s electoral system. The number of seats in parliament per constituency is effectively random. This setting permits us to…

Do crises erode trust in government? To answer this question, we leverage thequasi-experimental setting of the sharply increased military threat to the neutral county of Switzerland during the two world wars as an exogenous shock. In doing …

Using World Values Survey data, we show that individuals whose primary language usesthe same word for (financial) debt and (moral) guilt have a statistically significant and economically relevant lower probability of borrowing money. This r…

By examining discrepancies between officially reported GDP growth figures andthe actual economic growth implied by satellite-based night time light (NTL) density, we investigate whether democracies manipulate officially reported GDP figures…

This paper empirically explores the link between mass media coverage of migration and immigration worries. Using detaileddata on media coverage in Germany, we show that the amount of media reports regarding migration issues is positively as…

In 2003, the retirement age of Swiss construction workers was loweredfrom 65 to 60. This reform has been intended to improve their health. Our study shows the opposite outcome. The human capital theory suggests that investments in employees…

Die wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Erfolge der Schweiz werden oft auf zwei für sietypische politische Institutionen zurückgeführt: direkte Demokratie und Föderalismus. Wir vermuten, dass eine dritte, bisher weitgehend vernachl�…

Switzerland is known for its highly developed direct democracy. However, Swiss women were enfranchised at the federal level only in 1971 and in many cantons even later. We analyze the role of direct democracy in the delayed Swiss enfranchis…

The correct prediction of how alternative states of the world affect our lives is a cornerstoneof economics. We study how accurate people are in predicting their future well-being after facing major life events. Based on individual panel da…

Empirically orientated happiness research provides valuable and new insights to both business and political economics. Managers can benefit from the knowledge gained regarding the determinantsand even more from the consequences of subjectiv…

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…

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…

Female education and its potential to empower women in the development process have engaged the interest of policy makers and academics over the years. By employing individual level data from Ghana and Uganda, we analyze whether female educ…

The importance of culture for human behavior is well established in the economic literature. So far, most authors have emphasized the long persistence of cultural traits. In contrast, this paper deals with an important case of a rapid updat…

A majority of people in developing countries spend about 60 percent of their income on food, even though most of them are farmers. Hence, a change in food prices affects both their revenue as well as expenditure, and thereby their labor mar…

Institutions systematically affect which individuals gain positions in the different branchesof democratic government. Given agents› discretion in decision-making, their characteristics matter for policy choices. This perspective of politic…

We propose an immigration policy based the model of cooperatives. Incoming migrants haveto acquire a participation certificate. In exchange, the immigrants may enter the country of choice without danger. The revenue goes to the country of t…

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…

The return on investments in human and social capital increases in their economic lifetime. Thus, personal, parental, and societal investments in the capacities of individuals take place when these persons are young. Interestingly, the comp…

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…

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…

Empirical findings of a negative association between female participation in politics and the labor market, and levels of corruption have received great attention. We reproduce this correlation for 177 countries from 1998 to 2014. Once taki…

We examine whether immigrants have brought the missing women phenomenon to Germany and Switzerland.Using a range of micro data since 1990, we find no systematic gender selection of foreigners collectively, but a group of Balkan, Chinese and…

On July 5, this year, Swiss citizens will decide about the introduction of an unconditional basicincome. It should amount to 2’500 CHF per mo nth for adults and 625 CHF for children. Total expenditure would be about 200 Billion CHF, a pa rt…

This paper examines the effect of female age at marriage on female education and educational gender inequality.We provide empirical evidence that early female marriage age significantly decreases female education with panel data from 1980 t…

As the public debate over stem cell research continues, the observable voting behaviour in Switzerland offers a unique opportunity to compare the voting behaviour of politicians with that of voters. In this paper, by analysing the outcomes …

Countries differ substantially in how they deal with politicians that come from the publicsector. Most constitutions include incompatibility and ineligibility rules due to concerns about conflicts of interest and the politicization of the p…

We introduce a binomial mixture model for estimating the probability of legislative shirking. The estimated probability strongly correlates with the observed frequency of shirking obtained by matching parliamentary roll-call votes with the …

The consequences of tobacco control policies for individual welfare are difficult to assess,even more so when related consumption choices challenge people’s willpower. We therefore evaluate the impact of smoking bans and cigarette prices on…

Combining referendum results with parliamentary votes of proportionally-elected politicians ofthe Swiss Lower House of Parliament, Giger and Klüver (American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming) find that sectional and cause interest…

Is obesity the consequence of an optimally chosen lifestyle or do people consumetoo much relative to their long-term preferences? The latter perspective accepts that people might face self-control problems when exposed to the immediate grat…

We study a constitutional change in the German State of Bavaria where citizens, not politicians, granted themselves more say in politics at the local level through a state initiative election. This institutional setting allows us to observe…

We investigate whether Nobel laureates’ collaborative activities undergo a negative changefollowing prize reception by using publication records of 198 Nobel laureates and analyzing their coauthorship patterns before and after the Nobel P…

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…

Although tax non-filing and the resulting tax evasion are a challenge to public welfare of developingcountries, scholarly knowledge on the subject is minimal. The present paper compares rich self- employed identified as non-filers with a ra…

This study uses the case of professional soccer to investigate the determinants of human capital (HC)specificity. Inspired by labor market research, we formulate three hypotheses on how uncertainty about the usefulness of individuals’ (mo…

To explore the effects of daylights saving time (DST) transition on cognitive performance and risk-taking behaviour immediately before and one week after the shift to DST, this study examines two Australian populations living in similar geo…

This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolicawards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates. Randomization assures that re…

Despite much in-depth investigation of factors influencing this evolution invarious scientific fields, our knowledge about how efficiency or creativity is linked to the longevity of collaborative relationships remains very limited. We explo…

Whether democracy or capitalism should have normative priority depends on the philosophi-cal point of view but also how both are defined. The more rele vant perspective is, however, the positive one. Formally, politics dominate, bu t the ec…

This study uses a real case from professional soccer to examine intertemporal ratingerrors in performance appraisals. Motivated by research that extends the (prospective) optimistic bias and (retrospective) positivity bias to others, we for…

Many prior studies suggest that alphabetic ordering confers professionaladvantages on authors with earlier surname initials. However, these studies assume that authors select into coauthorships without regard to the incentives identified. W…

We analyze political representation of preferences of different income groups by matching referendum outcomes for low, middle,and high-income voters with individual legislators› decisions on identical policy proposals. Results indicate that…

Do politicians with a military background decide differently on military affairs? We investigate the informative institutional setting of the Swiss conscription army. Politicians who served in the military have a higher probability of accep…

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily in terms ofpublications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outsi…

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…

The US research university is a very successful model of higher edudaction and research. Weexamine its core elements and follow the current discussion on a necessary reform. Focusing on the institutional structure, we review possible causes…

Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature onvolunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life’s discontinuities (life event shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most st…

This article introduces the Fogs Artie program that attempts to close the gap ineducational attainment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and provides an evaluation of its effectiveness. The program is of special interest as…

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…

This paper discusses and proposes random selection as a component in decision-making insociety. Random procedures have played a significant role in history, especially in classical Greece and the medieval city-states of Italy. We examine th…

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…

This article critically reviews the empirical research on the association of firearmpossession with suicide and homicide.Both suicide and homicide reflect intentional behavior with the goal of killing oneself or another person. Firearms pro…

The belief that science is a young person’s game and thatonly young scientists can be productive and publish highquality research is still widely shared by university administrators and members of the scientific community. Since the avera…

Why do interactive brainstorming groups perform so much worse than individualsworking as nominal groups? This was the original question, which stimulated three decades of research, as described in this chapter. Three different phases in bra…

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…

A unique recent data set covering around 3,000 private art collections and collectors isused to identify their location and composition. The largest number of private collections is located in Europe, followed by North America and Asia. The…

University rankings are often used as indicators for university quality by scholars andpolicy makers. The main indicators common to all well-established rankings are the number of publications in well-known journals, and the citation freque…

Whenever the economic model of behaviour is to be applied, the utility function has – at leastsomewhat – to be specified. Buchanan generally prefers to apply a rather narrow version. However, he acknowledges that it is hardly possible t…

Despite extensive literature on female mate choice, empirical evidenceon women’s preferences in the search for a sperm donor is scarce, even though this search, by isolating a male’s genetic impact on offspring from other factors like p…

This paper constitutes a unique micro-level exploration of the relation between gameoutcome uncertainty and the behavior of highly committed season ticket holders of a major Bundesliga soccer team. Specifically, we look at 3,113 season tick…

In Switzerland, two key church institutions – the Conference of Swiss Bishops(CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) – make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to dire…

We examine the nature of stated subjective probabilities in a complex, evolving context in which true event probabilities are not withinsubjects› explicit information set. Specifically, we collect information on subjective expectations in a…

External prominence (measured by the number of pages indexed on search engines or TED talk invitations) canbe capitalized on the speakers› market while research performance (measured by publication and citation indicators) cannot. There is …

We identify the impact of transparency in political decision -making on thequality of political representation with a difference- in-difference strategy. The quality of political representation is measured by observed divergence of parliame…

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily interms of publications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outsi…

The tax compliance literature has mainly focused on individual tax evasionrather than firm tax evasion. In general, there is a lack of field experiments on the topic, and measuring tax compliance is challenging. To address this shortcoming …

In this paper, we analyze the effects of religious identity – defined both as personalidentification with a religious tradition and institutional ideas on the provision of public goods – on attitudes toward central government. We explor…

Nobel laureates have achieved the highest recognition in academia, reaching the boundaries ofhuman knowledge and understanding. Owing to past research, we have a good understanding of the career patterns behind their performance. Yet, we ha…

We compare the votes of parliamentary representatives and their constituents on a popular initiativethat directly aimed at weakening the separation of powers in 1922 in Switzerland. We analyze whether the strength of individual ties to the …

Under certain conditions, output related performance measurement and pay-for-performance producenegative outcomes. We argue that in public service, these negative effects are stronger than in the private sector. We combine Behavioural Econo…

This study explores whether awards breed further awards and what happens after a researcher receivesthe Nobel Prize. We therefore collected data on all the 1901 to 1980 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and medicine or physiology, looki…

In Switzerland, a constitutional initiative has been launched to introduce an unconditionalbasic income. It should amount to 2’500 CHF per month for adults and 625 CHF for children. Total expenditure would be 200 Billion CHF, of which 50 Bi…

This paper analyzes whether hosting the most prestigious European cultural event, theEuropean Capital of Culture, has an impact on regional economic development or the life satisfaction of the local population. Concerning the economic impac…

Based on probit estimates, this paper analyzes the effects of fiscal consolidation on the prob-ability of sovereign defaults in the short run. Using a panel of 104 developing countries from 1980 to 2009 and controlling for various economic,…

We exploit a natural measure of congruence between politicians and theirconstituency› bnm bnnb fgvhjuis preferences to directly quantify the extent of legislative shirking and evaluate the mechanism of the median voter model. The median vot…

Provided that the literature on th e deterrent effect of capital punishment is overall inconclu-sive, the fact that individual au thors persistently claim to have found solid evidence in one or the other direction raises two questions. Firs…

After more than five years have passed since the start of the global financial crisis,many European countries are still suffering from financial instability, surging sover- eign debt, economic stagnation or decline, high unemploym ent and p…

Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largelydisregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates whether a specific, yet important, award in economics, the John Bates Clark Medal, raises recipients? subs…

We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect ofexit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result ha…

We provide empirical evidence on the impact of personal income taxes and taxcompetition on income concentration in Switzerland. The fact that Swiss cantons have considerable taxing power enables us to study the effect of differences in the …

We explore the attitude towards risky career choices of young people in highly competitive environments.We empirically test which factors influence young elite athletes› tendency towards choosing a high-risk career option over a lower risk …

Although paying taxes is a key element in a well-functioning civilized society, theunderstanding of why people pay taxes is still limited. What current evidence shows is that, given relatively low audit probabilities and penalties in case o…

This paper examines the effect of superstars on external stakeholders’organizational identification through the lens of sport. Drawing on social identity theory and the concept of organizational identification, as well as on role model th…

A statistical analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage List is presented. The WorldHeritage Convention intends to protect global heritage of outstanding value to mankind, but there has been great concern about the missing representativity of t…

Using life cycle publication data of 9,368 economics PhD graduates from 127 U.S. institutions,we investigate how unemployment in the U.S. economy prior to starting graduate studies and at the time of entry into the academic job market affec…

Unrealistic optimism is a commonly observed bias in the perception ofchances. In this paper, we examine whether the bias is also present among young elite soccer players (10 to 23 years old) who receive regular objective feedback through ex…

An academic award is method by which peers offer recognition of intellectualefforts. In this paper we take a purely descriptive look at the relationship between becoming a Fellow of the Econometric Society and receiving the Nobel Prize in e…

In this study of the persistent social phenomenon of suicide, we find that eventhough theological and social differences between Catholicism and Protestantism have decreased, Catholics are still less likely than Protestants to commit or acc…

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period(1848-2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held o…

What determines political candidates? election prospects? We match roll call votes of candidates forthe majority elected upper house of parliament who were previously in the lower house with revealed preferences of their constituency. There…

Paternalism is an attempt to influence the decisions of individuals for their own benefit even ifthere are no third parties involved. This seems to be a contradiction to normative individualism which provides the general or ientation of our…

This study explores people’s risk attitudes after having suffered largereal-world losses following a natural disaster. Using the margins of the 2011 Australian oods (Brisbane) as a natural experimental setting, we find that homeowners who w…

Field experiments in the area of tax compliance are rare. This field experiment generates aunique data set with respect to individuals’ under-declaration of income and wealth and over-deductions of tax credits by obtaining exclusive full …

This study investigates the citation patterns of theoretical and empirical papers over a period of almost 30 years,while also exploring the determinants of citation success. The results indicate that empirical papers attract more citation s…

Algan and Cahuc in «Inherited Trust and Growth» (AER, 2010) argue that «inherited trust»is a key factor in explaining growth rates across countries. They derive a measure of inherited trust by linking respondents’ «home countries» in the …

Electoral systems determine the role party affiliations play in politicalrepresentation. According to conventional expectations, politicians’ party affiliations should influence political representation when they are elected by proportion…

We analyze whether female or male members of parliament adhere moreclosely to citizens’ revealed preferences with quasi-experimental data. By matching individual representatives’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with real refere…

This paper analyses synchronization in business cycles across the European Union (EU) since 1989.We include both old and new European Union members and countries which are currently negotiating accession, as well as potential European Union…

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…

This paper analyses co-movements in a wide group of commodity prices during the time period 1992-2010.Our methodological approach is based on the correlation matrix and the networks inside. Through this approach we are able to summarize glo…

Analysing emotional states under duress or during heightened, life-and-death situations is extremely difficult,especially given the inability of laboratory experiments to adequately replicate the environment and the inherent biases of post …

Liberal drug policy reform is often criticized for ‘sending the wrong message’, particularlyto youth. Reform opponents argue that liberal policies such as decriminalisation and medical marijuana laws will cause marijuana to be perceived…

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…

We match individual senators’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with 24real referenda decisions on exactly the same issues with identical wording. This setting allows us to evaluate the median voter model’s quality with revealed …

In parliament, individual representatives vote with a certain probability according to theirconstituents’ preferences. Thus, the mechanism of the Condorcet Jury Theorem can be fruitfully applied to parliamentary representation: The probab…

In Switzerland, political concordance or direct popular rights and the resulting consociationaldemocracy are often held responsible for delay or even cancellation of necessary political reforms. Switzerland is, however, not the only country…

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to PublicChoice. Two innovations are typical «Tullock Challenges». The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second r…

This paper investigates the business cycle co-movement across countries andregions since the middle of the last century as a measure for quantifying the ongoing globalization process of the world economy. Our methodological approach is base…

In 2007, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that each execution saves morethan 70 lives. This example is used to show how easy it is, using simple or advanced econometric techniques, to produce results that do or do not s…

First, the points of view of economists regarding falsificationism, scientific revolutions andscientific research programmes are discussed. Next, hardly debatable scientific progress regarding empirical economic research in recent decades i…

Management research has long focused on for-profitorganizations that produce privately owned resources based on central authority and within well-defined boundaries. In recent times, a new kind of enterprise has emerged that we call Communi…

A statistical analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage List is presented. The WorldHeritage Convention intends to protect global heritage of outstanding value to mankind, but there has been great concern about the missing representativity of t…

We study the income concentration in the Swiss federation over the course of the 20th centuryusing federal income tax statistics. The results suggest that top incomes in Switzerland evolved over time rather remaining constant across differe…

After a short sketch of the history of modern business schools in the German speaking countries,their four major activity fields are considered: (i) academic teaching, (ii) scientific research, (iii) consulting and (iv) executive education….

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 …

Is income equality a precondition for higher school performance and higher educational mobility?Or is the opposite true? We test empirically whether school performance and intergenerational transmission of educational attainment is dependin…

We assess the effect of constituents’ preferences on legislators’ decisions within a quasiexperimental setting: In the Swiss referendum process, citizens and legislators reveal their preferences for legislative proposals. We match roll …

The official intention of the UNESCO World Heritage List is to protect the global heritage.However, the existing List is highly imbalanced according to countries and continents. Historical reasons, such as historical GDP, population, and nu…

20 years ago, William Baumol provided an interesting wish list that outlined his hopes forthe future of economics over the next hundred years. Impatiently, this paper puts his wish list to the test by comparing the characteristics of public…

Baron von Richthofen (the Red Baron) arguably the most famous fighter pilot of all time paintedhis plane the vividest of red hues, making it visible and identifiable at great distance, showing an aggressive pronouncement of dominance to oth…

Research on happiness has produced valuable insights into the sources of subjectivewell-being that are of importance to economics. A major finding from this literature is that people exhibit a «baseline» level of happiness that shows persis…

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus betweencorruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property right…

We explore theoretically and empirically whether social interaction,including local and global interaction, influences the incidence of corruption. We first present an interaction-based model on corruption that predicts that the level of co…

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»,…

Recent literature emphasizes the importance of independent media for beneficialpolitical, economic and social outcomes. I investigate how media consumers react to state ownership of TV stations and the regulation and financing of these publ…

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 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…

Zur Konjunkturstabilisierung haben Regierungen und Notenbanken in den Jahren 2008 und2009 schnell und entschlossen mit Impulsprogrammen reagiert. Die erhoffte Wirkung blieb nicht aus, indessen wurden mit den staatlichen Eingriffen neue Prob…

The rise in executive compensation has triggered a great amount of public controversyand academic research. Critics have referred to the salaries paid to managers as ‹pay without performance›, while defenders have countered that the large s…

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for themajority?s preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis…

This paper suggests that institutional factors which reward social net-works at the expenses of productivity can play an important role in ex- plaining brain drain. The e€ects of social networks on brain drain are analyzed in a decision t…

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…

Museums have many different goals beyond efficiency such as social equity,financial revenue, attracting donors and gaining international, regional or local prestige. Various pricing schemes are being discussed with the aim of reaching these…

Die erfolgreiche Internet-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia demonstriert das Potential alternativer Produktionsmodelle für bedeutende Innovationen, die mit traditionellen Methoden nicht erreichbar sind. Sie arbeitet einerseits mit einem barrierefrei…

We use a panel of 21 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009 to investigate the effects of different fiscal adjustment strategies on long-term interest rates ? a key fiscal indicator reflecting the costs of government debt service. A government co…

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 …

With complementary Chinese data sets and alternative corruption measures, we explore theconsequences of corruption. Adopting a novel approach we provide evidence that corruption can have both, positive and negative effects, on economic deve…

What happens if national legal laws or enforcements and social norms are no longer able to directlyregulate individual behaviour? According to our knowledge, not much empirical evidence has emerged answering such a seemingly simple question…

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…

Fiscal packages usually capitalize into house prices. But if enough land forconstruction is available, housing developers can supply new houses and capitalization may disappear. We provide a theoretical model in which income taxes and publi…

After some theoretical considerations, fiscal institutions called ?debt brakes? designed to preventpublic deficit and debt from going off course, are discussed. We first present some models applied in some Swiss cantons, especially in the c…

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…

An empirical overview of the UNESCO World Heritage List according to variouscharacteristics is presented. The officially stated intention of the World Heritage List is to protect global heritage. Our focus is on the imbalance of the existin…

Using Swiss data from 1983 to 2008, this paper investigates whether growth rates of the differentmeasures of the quantity of money and or excess money can be used to forecast inflation. After a preliminary data analysis, money demand relati…

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…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of police officersÕ willingnessto quit their current department. For this purpose, we work with US survey data that covers a large set of police officers of the Baltimore Police …

This paper analyses the effect of gender on reported and perceived levels of stress throughexamination of both the physical and psychological indicators. It may be interesting to work with police data due to high stress levels among police …

In comparing Switzerland and Germany, this paper discusses basic but potentially conflictingconstitutional principles and the problems which can arise from such conflicts and which have to be handled by a constitution. We concentrate on thr…

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for the influence of income taxes on the choiceof residence of taxpayers at the local level. The fact that Swiss communities can individually set tax multipliers thereby shifting the progressive …

Dieses Papier untersucht die Stabilisierungswirkung der Schweizer Fiskalpolitik. Erstens zeigtsich, dass in etwa 60% der Fälle die verfolgte Fiskalpolitik des Bundes antizyklisch wirkte. In Rezessionen wirkte die Fiskalpolitik des Bundes i…

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of social capital in reducing the negative externalities associated with stress,as well as the physical and psychological indicators of stress among police officers. Despite the fact that there is a lar…

There is a notable shortage of empirical research directed at measuring the magnitude anddirection of stress effects on performance in a controlled environment. One reason for this is the inherent difficulties in identifying and isolating d…

We study the broken windows theory with a field experiment in a shared area of a workplace inacademia (department common room). We explore academics› and postgraduate students› behaviour under an order condition (clean environment) and a di…

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…

Improving transparency and enabling the principal to hold its agents accountable is a majorissue in any principal agent relationship. This paper focuses on the role of public auditors in this task and presents evidence on the impact of audi…

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…

Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective…

There is little disagreement that the EU budget should be refocused. Redistributive agricultural and structural spending should be reduced in favour of more public good spending as the Boege and Sapir reports demand. But a public choice ana…

Is the economic and financial crisis also a crisis of Economics? From different perspectives, today there is rather harsh criticism of Economics as a Social Science. In this paper, first, some of the recent failures of Economics are discuss…

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…

Culture has attributes of a global public good that needs to be preserved for mankind as a whole. World Culture Certificates are proposed to efficiently preserve World Heritage. The community of nations has to agree on the Global Heritage L…

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…

This paper investigates the robustness of 31 community speci?c explanatory variables for house prices in the Swiss metropolitan area of Zurich using Bayesian Model Averaging. The main variables which capitalize with a high posterior prob- a…

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…

Public debts capitalize into property prices. Therefore, property owners tend to favor tax over debt financing for government spending. In contrast, tenants do not suffer from debt capitalization. Thus, they tend to favor debt over tax fina…

This paper investigates spatial spillovers in local spending decisions between the center and the surrounding local communities by using panel data of the canton of Lucerne during the 1990s. Due to the geographical fragmentation with a majo…

This comment makes a contribution to Becker and Woessmann?s paper on a human capital theory of Protestant economic history eventually challenging the famous thesis by Max Weber who attributed economic success to a specific Protestant work e…

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…

The billionaires of the world attract significant attention from the media and the public. The popular press is full of books selling formulas on how to become rich. Surprisingly, only a limited number of studies have explored empirically t…

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better…

The major funding source for fundamental scientific research in the Netherlands (NWO), reserves more than half of their research budget for grants for young researchers. Researchers, who received their doctorate more than 15 years ago, cann…

Scholars today are under increasing pressure to publish in A-journals, the main role of which consists in certifying that a paper meets traditional academic standards. Consequences of this pressure are multiple authorship, slicing of ideas …

Awards play a large role in the economics profession, which is documented by the large variety and number of awards. However, little scientific attention has been devoted to them. This paper documents the prevalence of awards in the economi…

This paper analyzes awards as a means of motivation prevalent in the scientific community, but so far neglected in the economic literature on incentives, and discusses their relationship to monetary compensation. Awards are better suited th…

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…

Rational individuals know that present government debts transform into higher future taxes. The Ricardian equivalence implies that the burden of the debt is not shifted between generations because of compensating intergenerational transfers…

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…

The financial crisis made apparent the fact that managers and the boards of banks had failed to see the implications of irrational behavior and had ignored the risk associated with group think. Taking data from Switzerland our study shows t…

A rarely studied trend in corporate governance is the increasing tendency to fill CEO openings through external hires rather than through internal promotions: Kevin J. Murphy and Ján Zábojník (2004) show that the proportion of outside hi…

Director compensation has become a fashionable topic: Cross-nationally, the earnings of executives and non-executive directors have risen significantly in recent years. Academic literature offers two hypotheses for this trend, a ?fat cat? a…

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…

Policymakers often propose strict enforcement strategies to fight the shadow economy and to increase tax morale. However, there is also a bottom-up approach such as, for example, decentralizing the political power to those who are close to …

This paper addresses the personal linkages between the public administration and the legislature that emerge because public servants pursue a political mandate. There are concerns that the strong representation of bureaucrats in many Wester…

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 …

This paper explored the determinants of survival in a life and death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested to see whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on t…

The risk of external interventions crowding-out intrinsic motivation has long been established in economics. This paper introduces a new dimension by arguing that a crowding-out effect does become possible if individuals receive higher rela…

We explore whether environmental motivation affects environmental behavior by focusing on volunteering. The paper first introduces a theoretical model of volunteering in environmental organizations. In a next step, it tests the hypothesis w…

The experimental literature and studies using survey data have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. Ind…

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…

Who is the best formula 1 driver? Until today it was impossible to answer this question because the observable performance of a driver depends both on his talent and the quality of his cars. In this paper we for the first time separate driv…

Awards in the form of orders, decorations, prizes, and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, not-for-profit, and profit-oriented firms. This paper argues that awards present a unique combination of differ…

It is generally understood that people care about their absolute income position, and several studies have in fact moved beyond this, showing that people also place considerable signifcance on their relative income position. However, empiri…

Do employees care about their relative (economic) position among co-workers in an organization? And if so, does it raise or lower their performance? Behavioral evidence on these important questions is rare. This paper takes a novel approach…

The experimental literature and studies using survey data have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. Ind…

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be mi…

The paper explores whether a social learning model helps explain the observed conformity and compliance with social norms after the unification of Germany. We compare tax morale, (the willingness to pay taxes), between inhabitants of East a…

The paper investigates the relationship between environmental participation and littering. Previous empirical work in the area of littering is scarce as is evidence regarding the determinants of littering behavior. We address these deficien…

People care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper provides evidence on how the relative income position affects profession…

In the economic literature various political institutions designed to control the government have been analyzed. However, an important institution has been neglected so…

Corporate auditors review and evaluate financial statements. To enhance independence the selection process and mandatory auditor rotation requirements have been debated intensively. The available empirical evidence is not conclusive and suf…

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…

In recent years the topic of corruption has attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of empirical evidence about the determinants of corruption at the micro level. Therefore we explore in detail the impact of poli…

Awards in the form of orders, decorations, prizes, and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, not-for-profit, and profit-oriented firms. This paper argues that awards present a unique combination of differ…

The paper investigates empirically the differences in preferences towards protection of the environment. Using seven different dependent variables to focus on the impact of age, gender and children we use a large micro data set covering dat…

Democratic elections look very much like a contest where voters have to compare the candidates according to an ordinal ranking. Nevertheless, the theory of tournaments has not yet been applied to Political Economics. Therefore, we deploy to…

A central aspect of historical research is to provide explanations for the causes and effects of events that occurred in the past, in particular the Second World War. History can be analyzed and explained from different perspectives. Two su…

This paper analyzes and compares different ways of assessing how people perceived impending threats of war in the past. Conventional Nordic historiography of World War II claims there were few, if any, people in the Nordic countries who per…

Taxpayers are more compliant than the traditional economic models predict. Why? The literature calls it the ?puzzle of tax compliance?. In this paper we use field, experimental and survey data to investigate the empirical evidence on whethe…

This paper turns Snow-White?s magic mirror onto recent economics Nobel Prize winners, top economists and happiness researchers, and through the eyes of the ?man in the street? seeks to determine who the happiest academic is. The study not o…

The size and development of the shadow economy of Germany and Austria is estimated, us-ing various estimation procedures. An increased burden of taxation and social security pay-ments, combined with intensive labor market regulation, qualit…

This paper presents the first MIMIC (multiple indicator multiple causes) model estimate of the size and development of the shadow economy and of do-it-yourself (DIY) activities in Germany from 1970 to 2005. By 2005, they reached a level of …

In this paper we argue that a more legitimate and responsive state is an essential factor for a more adequate level of tax effort in developing countries. While at first glance giving such advice to poor countries seeking to increase their …

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…

Many taxpayers truthfully declare their income to the tax administration. Why? In this paper we have found a significant correlation between tax morale and tax evasion, controlling a variety of factors. Furthermore we have analysed tax mora…

The paper investigates the relationship between pro-social norms and its implications for improved environmental outcomes, an area which has been neglected in the environmental economics literature. We provide empirical evidence, demonstrat…

In a centralized federation, where tax rates and taxation rules are set by the federal govern-ment, manipulating the thoroughness of tax auditing and the effectiveness of tax collection could be attractive for regional authorities because o…

In the course of history a large number of politicians has been assassinated. A rational choice analysis is used to distinguish the expected marginal benefits of killing, and the marginal cost of attacking a politician. The comparative anal…

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…

A common political claim is that decentralized governments undermine policy makers? ability to fight fiscal imbalance. This paper examines how different fiscal institutions influence the likeli-hood of a successful fiscal adjustment. Using …

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individuals? attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, using the International Social Survey Programme 1998 data from 26 countries this paper investigates the impact…

Policymakers often propose strict enforcement strategies to fight the shadow economy and to increase tax morale. However, there is also a bottom-up approach: decentralizing the political power to those who are close to the problems and give…

This paper provides a comparison of tax morale between inhabitants of East and West Germany in its post-reunification period, using three World Values Survey/European Values Survey waves between 1990 and 1999. The setting of German reunific…

This paper analyses how governance or institutional quality and tax morale affect the shadow economy, using an international country panel and also within country data. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these…

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries? institutional quality affect the shadow economy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of …

Relative income differences are likely to lead to envy within a reference group. Envy in turn influences social behavior and on individual performance. While positional concerns are apparent in daily life, empirical evidence is rare in the …

Nordic historians have asserted for a long time that in the Nordic countries only few people, if any, perceived increased threats of war prior to the World War II outbreak. This would explain, and possibly excuse, why their governments did …

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…

This paper investigates the relative impact of regional energy production on the legislative choices of Russian Duma deputies on energy regulation between 1994 and 2003. We apply Poole?s optimal classification method of roll call votes usin…

There is an intensive dispute in political economics about the impact of institutions on income redistribution. While the main focus is on comparison between different forms of representative democracy, the influence of direct democracy on …

Research evaluation is praised as the symbol of modern quality management. We claim firstly, performance evaluations in research have higher costs than normally assumed, because the evaluated persons and institutions systematically change t…

The impact of regulatory competition on policy outcomes and particularly on policy innova-tion is widely debated among scientists from different fields as well as among policymakers. In this paper, Swiss cantonal regulation is studied in or…

The Swiss fiscal system is characterised by an extensive fiscal federalism with high fiscal autonomy at all governmental levels, by direct popular rights which include fiscal referenda at the cantonal and local levels, and by particular con…

The literature on social capital has strongly increased in the last two decades, but, there still is a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of trust. Most studies have focused on social or generalized trust, while t…

Many studies have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper…

?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…

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…

This paper analyzes the impact of rewards on tax compliance as an additional instrument to take into account. While social psychologists and neuroscientists have emphasized the importance of rewards, the tax compliance literature has strong…

In recent years the topics of illegal activities such as corruption or tax evasion have attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of compliance. The aim of t…

The literature on volunteering has strongly increased in the last few years. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of environmental participation. This empirical study analyses a cross-secti…

The traditional economic approach to tax evasion does not appear to be particularly successful in explaining the extent of tax compliance. We argue instead that a psychological tax contract which establishes a fiscal exchange between the st…

The most influential approach of corporate governance, the view of shareholders supremacy does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in or…

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…

In this paper, we develop the concept of a psychological tax contract that goes beyond the traditional deterrence model and explains tax morale as a complicated interaction between taxpayers and the government. Based on crowding theory, the…

Recently, the problems associated with the existing journal review process aroused discussions from seasoned management researchers, who have also made useful suggestions for improving the process. To complement these suggestions, we propos…

It has often been pointed out in the literature that a symbiotic relationship exists between terrorist groups and the media. As yet, however, no formal model has been built based on this issue and only very little empirical research has bee…

This paper investigates the role of the State Duma of Russia in energy regulation between 1994 and 2003. We applying Poole?s optimal classification model of roll call votes using an ordered probit model to show impact of partisan, bureaucra…

The literature on volunteering has strongly increased in the last few years. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of environmental participation. This empirical study analyses a cross-secti…

Trends in arts and culture tend to be longer-lasting and less fragile than in other fields such as clothing design. Most herding models are not able to explain such stability, instead predicting informational cascades to be fragile and fads…

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individual attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, this paper assesses such positional impact on social capital by applying 14 different measurements to Internatio…

Many studies have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper…

This paper empirically investigates the differences in the motives of raising privatisation proceeds for a panel of EU countries from 1990 to 2000. More specifically, we test whether privatisations can be mainly interpreted (a) as ingredien…

This paper analyzes the influence of the shadow economy on corruption and vice versa. We hypothesize that corruption and shadow economy are substitutes in high income countries while they are complements in low income countries. The hypothe…

This paper studies the evolutions of tax morale in Spain in the post-Franco era. Tax morale, defined as the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, might be a key determinant of the actual degree of tax compliance in a country. But despite its p…

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…

Famous cultural monuments are often regarded as unique icons, making them an attractive target for terrorists. Despite huge military and police outlays, terrorist attacks on important monuments can hardly be avoided. We argue that an effect…

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…

There is considerable evidence that enforcement efforts can increase tax compliance. However, there must be other forces at work because observed compliance levels cannot be fully explained by the level of enforcement actions typical of mos…

The intention of this paper is to analyse how audit courts and local autonomy affect political discussion, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a broad variety of potential factors focusing on Switzerland, due to its variety of audit …

This paper examines citizens? attitudes toward paying taxes ? what is sometimes termed their ?tax morale?, or the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes ? focusing on the experience of individuals in the Russian Federation. A unique aspect of ou…

Der familienergänzenden Kinderbetreuung wird grosse wirtschaftspolitische Bedeutung zugemessen, und es fliessen immer mehr staatliche Mittel insbesondere in die Förderung von Kinderkrippen. Mit der Subventionierung geht eine zunehmende Re…

In this paper we investigate the pay-performance relationship of soccer players using individual data from eight seasons of the German soccer league Bundesliga. The results of our panel analysis show that not only the absolute income level,…

The basic distinction made in this volume compares ?economic value?, expressed in monetary terms, to ?cultural value?, reflecting cultural, aesthetic and artistic significance. This paper makes a different distinction which is rarely made e…

Do people prefer a society with an extensive social welfare system with high taxes, or low taxes but lax redistributive policies? Although economists have for a long time investigated the trade-off mechanism between equity and efficiency, s…

Since the 70s, an increasing number of studies investigating environmental preferences have been made. However, papers related to a country and its regions or its development over time are still largely lacking, although it is a promising l…

Recent empirical literature has shown that the determination of intergovernmental grants is highly influenced by the political bargaining power of the recipient states. In these models federal politicians are assumed to buy the support of s…

Three topics of a European constitution are discussed. First, basic arguments from constitutional political economy that aim at restricting representatives? potential misuse of powers in a European Union with extended competencies are summa…

Tax competition is discussed as a source of inefficiency in international taxation and in fiscal federalism. Two preconditions for the existence of such effects of tax competition are that mobile fac-tors locate or reside in jurisdictions w…

We propose and test a positive model of fiscal federalism in which centralization is less likely to occur in jurisdictions with referendum decisions on policy cen-tralization. Citizens choose centralization of public spending and revenue in…

Law backed by non-deterrent sanctions (mild law) has been hypothesized to achieve compliance because of norm activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild law in the provision of public goods by comparing it to severe law (d…

The paper studies a major human activity ? that of watching TV – where many individuals have incomplete control over, and foresight into, their own behavior. As a consequence, they watch more TV than they consider optimal for themselves and…

Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a p…

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…

Corporate scandals are reflected in excessive top management compensation and fraudulent accounts. These scandals cause an enormous amount of damage, not only to the companies affected, but also to the market economy as a whole. As a soluti…

Does Open Source (OS) represent a new innovation model, and under what conditions can it be employed in other contexts? A look into history shows that OS isn?t a unique example of what is called ?collective invention?. Other examples are bl…

This paper analyses fiscal autonomy in Germany. First, it provides an overview of fiscal autonomy. What is novel in this paper compared to previous studies is the development of a fiscal autonomy coefficient for the states, based on communa…

There is considerable evidence that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. To resolve this puzzle of tax compliance, many researchers have argued that citizens? attitudes toward paying taxes or tax moral…

Citizens are willing to abandon their short-term financial interest in free-riding considerably, if governments act in their interest, if procedures of the public decisions-making process are felt to be fair and if other fellow-citizens hav…

How a sustainable fiscal policy can be performed in a federal system is not only a Swiss prob-lem but is also discussed in other federal countries like Germany and Austria, and in the European Union. Contrary to most other countries, the Sw…

Individuals make systematic mistakes in their decisions, because they mispredict utility from choice options. When deciding, extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. Adaptation is neglected, recolle…

Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause considerable damage. Agency theory?s insistence on linking the compensation of managers and directors as closely as possible to firm performan…

Distortions in memory impose important bounds on rationality but have been largely disregarded in economics. While it is possible to learn, it is more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to unlearn. This retention effect lowers individual …

World governance today is characterized by international organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to …

People mostly pay their taxes although there is a low probability of getting caught and being penalized. Thus, new attempts in the tax compliance literature try to go beyond standard economic theory. This paper examines citizens? attitudes …

In dieser Arbeit werden die Auswirkungen des Frauenstimmrechts auf die Staatsausgaben in den Kantonen der Schweiz untersucht. Anhand dieser institutionell bedingten Veränderung des Elektorats studieren wir den Zusammenhang zwischen repräs…

Alienation to politics weakens political competition and can undermine the acceptance and legitimacy of democracy as a political system. Governance and representation problems at the local level cause part of citizens? lack of power and pol…

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…

The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are su…

Cycling has not been analyzed intensively in the economics of sports literature. This paper reports empirical evidence of individuals? performances in the 2004 ?Tour de France?. We investigate different performances such as total ranking, m…

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…

The expansion of economics to ?non-market topics? such as football has received increased attention in recent years. However, most of the studies focus on men?s performances, whereas this paper reports empirical evidence of women?s internat…

Most of the football papers that measure the international performances focus on the ranking system provided by the FIFA. Surprisingly, the World Cup per se has not been analyzed intensively. This paper as a novelty reports empirical eviden…

There is considerable evidence that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. Previous studies have found differences in compliance behaviour across cultures. Novel in this paper is to investigate the impac…

There is a vast empirical literature investigating the relationship between government size and economic growth. But the empirical evidence of growth effects of public expenditure using cross-country regres-sions is still inconclusive. Acco…

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate t…

In recent years much research has investigated whether values, social norms, and attitudes differ across countries and whether these differences have measurable effects on economic behavior. One area in which such studies are particularly r…

There is considerable evidence that enforcement efforts can increase tax compliance. However, there must be other forces at work because observed compliance levels cannot be fully explained by the level of enforcement actions typical of mos…

Volunteering constitutes one of the most important pro-social activities. Following Adam Smith, helping others is the way to higher individual well-being. This view contrasts with the selfish utility maximizer who avoids costs from helping …

This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people?s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The streng…

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 employs experiments to examine the effects of social comparisons in ultimatum bargaining. We inform responders on the average offer before they decide whether to accept or reject their specific offer. To provide a metric for soci…

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…

The intention of this paper is to analyse how audit courts affect tax morale, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a broad variety of potential factors. Switzerland with its variety of audit court competences among the cantons has bee…

This paper analyses tax morale in transition countries. Tax morale has been used as dependent variable working with World Values Survey and European Values data for different years (1990-2000). The results suggest that trust, measured as tr…

Why citizens pay their taxes voluntarily is an important question for tax administrations worldwide. Some believe it is because taxpayers are deterred from tax evasion out of a fear of being caught or penalised. Others, in contrast, suggest…

Using various statistical procedures, estimates about the size of the shadow economy in 110 developing, transition and OECD countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 1999-2000 in devel…

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…

In a controlled field experiment in Switzerland this paper analyses the effects of moral suasion on the timely paying and filling out of the tax form 2001, and the honesty regarding the declaration of domestic income from capital gains, lot…

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…

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…

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…

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. This paper argues that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility an…

This paper investigates spatial spillovers in local spending decisions by using panel data of the Swiss communes in the canton of Lucerne during the 1990s. Due to the geographical fragmentation with a major central city and some 100 suburba…

A crucial aspect of constitutional design is the provision of rules on how a constitution is to be amended. If procedures for constitutional amendment are very restrictive, changes will take place outside the constitution. These changes are…

In situations of excess demand, many firms use waiting lists to allocate products and services among their customers. The resulting allocation is likely to be inefficient, creating opportunities for Pareto improving trades among those who a…

This study examines the financing choices of firms operating in a weak institutional environment. We argue that in relationship-based systems, global financing and political connections are substitutes: Well-connected firms are less likely …

People not only care about outcomes, they also value the procedures which lead to the outcomes. Procedural utility is a potentially important source of human well-being. This paper aims at introducing the concept of procedural utility into …

We analyze the behavior of game-show contestants who play a one-shot game called Friend or Foe. While it is a weakly dominant strategy not to cooperate, almost half the contestants on the show choose to play ?friend.? Remarkably, the behavi…