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 proposes a theory of migration decisions in which cultural traits play a role. Individuals are assumed to value comfort (high wages) and conformity (interactions with individuals who share similar world views). Regions are assumed to differ economically (average wages) and culturally...

Institutions are important for proper economic performance, but are replaceable by trust or other social norms. We show that when proper institutions and trust are missing, integrity of the individuals can replace them. We construct a model of a transactions-based economy with contracts...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

The digital revolution has led to a quantification of ever more areas of human life and society. At the same time, there is an explosion of the number of awards, which by their very nature are based on non-quantified performance. Will quantification take over completely, leading to...

This paper proposes a theory of migration decisions in which cultural traits play a role. Individuals are assumed to value comfort (high wages) and conformity (interactions with individuals who share similar world views). Regions are assumed to differ economically (average wages) and culturally...

This articles investigates the recent trends in co-authorship in economics. Using data from more than 700.000 journal articles we show that the average number of authors per article has increased over the last years. This process is likely to be continued in the future. In a regression analysis...

This paper incorporates publication uncertainty in a game between researchers and journal editors and examines its effects on quantity and quality of published research. A stylized differential Stackelberg game between journal editors and academic authors is considered, where authors seek to...

We investigate the relationship between article title characteristics and citations in economics using a large data set from Web of Science. Our results suggest that articles with a short title that also contains a non-alphanumeric character achieve a higher citation count.

In this paper we transfer the Elo rating system, which is widely accepted in chess, sports and other disciplines, to rank scientific journals. The advantage of the Elo system is the explicit consideration of the factor time or the history of a journal’s performance. Most other rankings that...