Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causal forces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of “university,” and inadequate organizational forms for modern...

Awards are widespread in all countries and are prevalent both in the public sphere and in the private sector. This paper argues, and empirically supports, that awards serve public functions and economists should take them seriously. Using a unique cross-country data set, we suggest that awards...

Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective. As scholarly research is a mainly curiosity driven...

Academic economists today are caught in a “Publication Impossibility Theorem System” or PITS. To further their careers, they are required to publish in A-journals, but for the vast majority this is impossible because there are few slots open in such journals. Such academic competition maybe...

Culture has attributes of a global public good that needs to be preserved for mankind as a whole. World Culture Certificates are proposed to efficiently preserve World Heritage. The community of nations has to agree on the Global Heritage List and how much each nation is to contribute to that...

In economics there is presently an almost revolutionary development. The direct measurement of subjective welfare challenges traditional economics, inspires it, and opens new avenues for scientific research. The approaches and possibilities of an economic analysis of happiness are shown and...

Four types of “economics” relevant for institutional analysis are distinguished: Standard Neoclassical Economics; Socio-Economics or Social Economics; New Institutional Economics; and Psychological Economics (often misleadingly called Behavioural Economics). The paper argues that an...

This paper argues that the “Economics of Crime” concentrates too much on punishment as a policy to fight crime, which is unwise for several reasons. There are important instances in which punishment simply cannot reduce crime. Several feasible alternatives to punishment exist, such as...

Awards—widespread in the corporate sector and elsewhere—are motivators that derive their value from non-pecuniary concerns such as status and self-image. Quasi-experimental panel data from the call center of a large international bank allow us to estimate the causal impact on effort when...