In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...

This paper discusses libertarian (or soft) paternalism, as proposed among others by Thaler and Sunstein (2008). It is argued that libertarian paternalism should not be understood as an efficiency-enhancing, but as a redistributive concept. The relationship between libertarian paternalism and...

A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. We argue that such learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a...

The sociologist R. Dahrendorf has recently suggested that there is no and there ought to be no convergence of economic policies towards some common ideal model. On the contrary, he states that diversity is [...] at the very heart of a world that has abandoned the need for closed, encompassing...

Public choice theory has originally been motivated by the need to correct the asymmetry, widespread in traditional welfare economics, between the motivational assumptions of market participants and policymakers: Those who played the game of politics should also be considered rational and...