We use census-like data and a regression discontinuity design to study the labor market impacts of a signal provided by a government-sponsored award given to top-performing students on a nationwide college exit exam in Colombia. Students who can signal their high level of specific skills earn...

Gegenstand dieses Aufsatzes sind die fundamentalen Probleme liberaler Argumente in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Anders als dies die Zyklen in der Dogmengeschichte nahelegen, erweist sich die gegenwärtige Krise des Wirtschaftsliberalismus dabei nicht als eine vorübergehende „Rezession“,...

Dieses Papier verdeutlicht die zentrale Bedeutung normativer Aspekte im Zusammenhang mit ökonomischen Empfehlungen zur Reform der deutschen Sozialsysteme und leitet hieraus eine besondere Relevanz der Wirtschaftsethik in diesem Rahmen ab. Wir identifizieren die ethische Dimension der...

Can a court system conceivably control opportunistic behavior if judges are selected from the same population as ordinary citizens and thus are no better than "the rest of us"? This paper provides a new and, as we claim, quite profound "rational choice" answer to that unsolved riddle. Adopting...

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily in terms of publications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outside world are far more extensive and recently developed...

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily in terms of publications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outside world are far more extensive and recently developed...

Billions of dollars are allocated every year to university research. Increased specialisation and international integration of research and researchers has sharply raised the need for comparisons of performance across fields, institutions and individual researchers. However, there is still no...

This is the first paper that studies the causal effect of studying economics on subjective well being. Based on a survey among 918 students of economics and other social sciences, we estimate the effects of studying in the different fields on individual life satisfaction. Controling for personal...

Neoclassical economists of the current era frequently pay lip service to Adam Smith’s theories to certify the validity of natural-laws-based, laissez-faire policies. However, neoclassical theories are fundamentally disconnected from Adam Smith’s notion of value, his understanding of the...