In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

In this paper it is argued that locus of control beliefs and preferences concerning state action negatively affect the formation of new firms in former socialist countries. For this purpose Kirzner's theory of costless entrepreneurship is reviewed and criticized. German reunification, in which...

Recent studies focused on testing the Easterlin hypothesis (happiness and national income correlate in the cross-section but not over time) on a global level. We make a case for testing the Easterlin hypothesis at the country level where individual panel data allow exploiting important...

Theory suggests that subjective well-being is affected by income comparisons and adaptation to income. Empirical tests of the effects often rely on self-constructed measures from survey data. This paper shows that results can be highly sensitive to simple parameter changes. Using large-scale...

We model a boundedly rational agent who suffers from limited attention. The agent considers each feasible alternative with a given (unobservable) probability, the attention parameter, and then chooses the alternative that maximises a preference relation within the set of considered alternatives....

Adopted on September 8 of 2000, the United Nations Millennium Declaration stated as its first goal that countries "…[further] resolve to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from...

Traditional economic interpretations have not been successful in explaining differences in saving rates across countries. One hypothesis is that savings respond to cultural specific social norms. A seminal paper in economics (1) however did not find any effect of culture on savings. We revisit...

We propose an extension of Tversky's lexicographic semiorder to a model of boundedly rational choice. We explore the connection with sequential rationalisability of choice, and we provide axiomatic characterisations of both models in terms of observable choice data

In this paper we investigate the effects of delinquency and arrest on school leaving using information on males from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. We use a multivariate mixed proportional hazard framework in order to account for common unobserved confounders and reverse...

The Hicksian definition of complementarity and substitutability may not apply in contexts in which agents are not utility maximisers or where price or income variations, whether implicit or explicit, are not available. We look for tools to identify complementarity and substitutability satisfying...