The objective of this paper is to understand certain developments in contemporary arts from an economic point of view. The peculiarity of art is its aesthetic quality in combination with its value as an investment object. Accordingly, four segments of the art market may be distinguished:...

Tuition fees – as they are now possible in the German system of higher education – may change the behaviour of students. To analyse these reactions more rigorously, a microeconomic decision model is constructed. It consists of two periods: in the first one, students invest in their human...

In this paper, we attempt to show why the importance of relational goods compared to conventional goods and status goods threatens to decline in contemporary societies. In our point of view, the development of the relative significance of these three types of goods is not a consequence of...

In this paper, a formalization of Martin Seligman’s concept of full life is presented by employing basic microeconomics. With the formalized version of the concept, it can be explained why people differ with respect to the levels of pleasant, engaged and meaningful life they are trying to...

In the following we will propose an indicator that focuses on physical as well as socio-psychic wellbeing. At its core, this indicator is a modification of Ruut Veenhoven’s concept of Happy Life Years and it is called Happy Income. This indicator is constructed on the intention that the...

Kirchler, Hoelzl, and Wahl (2008) presented with the so-called ‘slippery slope’ framework a new approach to understand tax compliance. The slippery slope approach supposes two routes to tax compliance: deterrence of tax evasion by audits and fines on the one hand, and building a trusting...

This article presents new estimates of the Greek underground economy and explores the link between the underground economy and aggregate debt. We show that the Greek underground economy has been underestimated heavily and has been on a rising trend again since Greece adopted the Euro. We also...

A number of authors have proposed that firms can internalize externalities through their shareholders. This paper investigates this proposition, focusing on public bads. Theoretically it is, indeed, possible that shareholders decide that the firm reduces its public bads at the cost of profits,...