In recent economic literature, there has been an increasing interest in modelling preferences as endogenous. Some arguments go along the lines that institutions shape preferences. This paper suggests that adopting a more substantive concept of preferences furthers our understanding of how they...

In recent economic literature, there has been an increasing interest in modellingpreferences as endogenous. Some arguments go along the lines that institutions shapepreferences. This paper suggests that adopting a more substantive concept ofpreferences furthers our understanding of how they...

The paper investigates the interplay between the institutions of law and property and innate propensities towards possession. The questions to be answered are: How do property relations emerge in historical-anthropological terms in contrast to the well-known constitutional perspective and what...

We use a panel vector autoregressions model to examine the coevolution of changes in happiness and changes in income, health, marital status as well as employment status for the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set. This technique allows us to simultaneously analyze the impact of the...

Bad health can severely disrupt a person's life. We apply matching estimators to examine how changes in subjective health status as well as different (objective) conditions of bad health affect subjective well-being. The strongest effect is in the category alcohol and drug abuse, followed by...

Although decision makers are often reported to have difficulties in making comparisons between multi-dimensional decision outcomes, economic theory assumes a uni-dimensional utility measure. This paper reviews evidence from behavioral and brain sciences to assess whether, and for what reasons,...

There is an ambiguity in Amartya Sen's capability approach as to what constitutes an individual's resources, conversion factors and valuable functionings. What we here call the "circularity problem" points to the fact that all three concepts seem to be mutually endogenous and interrelated. All...

Innovations are inherently connected to knowledge transfers. The need of face-to-face contacts to transfer tacit knowledge is commonly argued to cause a regional dimension of innovative activities. The paper presents an alternative explanation based on a model of boundedly rational actors who...