In recent economic literature, there has been an increasing interest in modelling preferences as endogenous. Some arguments go along the lines that institutions shape preferences. This paper suggests that adopting a more substantive concept of preferences furthers our understanding of how they...

The concept of "utility" is often used in ambiguous ways in economics, from having substantive psychological connotations to being a formal placeholder representing a person's preferences. In the accounts of the early utilitarians, it was a multidimensional measure that has been condensed during...

Over the past two decades, the United Nations Security Council has responded more strongly to some humanitarian crises than to others. This variation in Security Council action raises the important question of what factors motivate United Nations intervention. This article offers a...

Despite lower incomes the self-employed often report higher job satisfaction. But this increased job satisfaction only sometimes translates into higher life satisfaction, likely due to the heterogeneous nature of self-employment. By distinguishingdifferent types of self-employment, this paper...

This paper examines the politicization of the United Nations Security Council (SC) and seeks to explore the causes and effects of this process. I will first demonstrate that the SC has expanded both its scope and authority after the end of the Cold War. With the SC becoming more powerful I then...

How did the international community respond to violent humanitarian crises and gross violations of human rights after the end of the Cold War? While from an optimistic perspective on global governance it is argued that humanitarian crises have been increasingly addressed, skeptics maintain that...

In diesem Discussion-paper wird das Forschungsprogramm der Abteilung „Transnationale Konflikte und internationale Institutionen“ (TKI) vorgestellt. Das Forschungsprogramm richtet den Blick auf eine Entwicklungsdynamik, die durch die Errichtung der internationalen Institutionen nach dem...

This short note seeks to replicate the quantile regression analysis in Binder and Coad (2011), but taking into account individual-specific fixed effects (using the BHPS data set). It finds declining effects of the four main variables of interest (health, social life, income, education) over the...