Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

This paper argues that the consumption value of education is an important motivation for the educational choice. While controlling for ability, we document that individuals are willing to forego substantial future wage returns in order to acquire a particular type of higher education. We...

The consumption value of higher education is an important factor behind the individual’s educational choice. We provide a comprehensive literature survey, and define the consumption value as the private, intended, non-pecuniary return to higher education. We provide new empirical evidence for...

This paper contrasts the modern use of the assumption that rationality guides individual economic behaviour, as reflected in simple models of utility and profit maximization, to literature between 1890 and 1930 which sharply challenged the use of such an assumption, as well as to later...

"Longtermism" is the view that the impacts of our actions on the very long-term future deserve prominent consideration in decision-making. We discuss the primary barrier that prevents academic economists from contributing to longtermist research: an overly rigid preference for methodological...

After presenting some casual evidence about the difference between economists and the rest of the population, first the survey and experimental evidence which has been presented on this topic during the last 20 years is discussed. But can these results really be transferred to real world...

There is a fundamental difference between the natural and the social sciences due to reactivity. This difference remains even in the age of Artificially Intelligent Learning Machines and Big Data. Many academic economists take it as a matter of course that economics should become a natural...

We examine the various senses in which economist use the term “rationality” and then outline some of the commonly drawn implications and auxiliary assumptions. Finally, we confront the implications with the empirical evidence, drawing on the insights from the exciting new field of behavioral...

The official U.S. unemployment rate is an inadequate measure of actual labor market conditions. This poses a major challenge for researchers and confuses both the public and policy makers. A new definition of unemployment is proposed. It considers those part-time workers who would like to work...

The classical Wage Fund (Capital or Credit) framework is integrated with the simplest text-book version of the Ricardian model of comparative advantage, generating a model that replicates important features of the neo-classical production theory involving capital and labour without neo-classical...