Most professional economists believe that economist in general are more selfish than other persons and that this greater selfishness is due to economic education. In this paper we offer empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set about giving behaviour to two...

Business students are portrayed as behaving too egoistically. The critics call for more social responsibility and good citizenship behavior on the part of business students. We present evidence of pro-social behavior in business students. Every student at the University of Zurich has to decide...

Many people believe that economists in general are more selfish than other people and that this greater selfishness is due to economics education. This paper offers empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set on giving behaviour in connection with two social funds...

Rational Choice Theory is often criticized to indoctrinate students in a negative, which is supported by some laboratory experiments. But do students of Rational Choice Theory really behave more selfishly? This paper presents evidence from a natural decision on voluntary donation at the...

This paper suggests that institutional factors which reward social networks at the expenses of productivity can play an important role in explaining brain drain. The effects of social networks on brain drain are analyzed in a decision theory framework with asymmetric information. We distinguish...

SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners'...

I construct a theory of cultural transmission in which culture acquisition takes place in two stages, first in the family where parents transmit their own culture, and later in society where children are exposed to a wider set of cultural models. The role of models is to provide information...

Seit Mitte der achtziger Jahre hat die neue Wachstumstheorie verstärkt Aufmerksamkeit auf Humankapital als eine Quelle des Wirtschaftswachstums gelenkt. Neuere empirische Ergebnisse weisen allerdings darauf hin, dass Bildungsinvestitionen nur geringe soziale Externalitäten erzeugen und dass...

We analyze the evolution of culture when parents socialize children to the cultural variants that maximize child lifetime utility. Parents invest in cultural transmission taking into account that children are also influenced by peers. We model the influence of peers by assuming that children...

This paper examines the role of religious denomination for human capital formation. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of...