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...

Economists have played a powerful role in shaping modern Australia. Drawing on my experience as an academic economist and an economic policymaker, I outline ten principles to guide economists seeking to maximise their impact. These are to (1) Focus on wellbeing, not just dollars; (2) Think...

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 an...

We study the political opinions of Swedish social scientists in seven disciplines. A survey was sent to 4,301 academics at 25 colleges and universities, which makes the coverage of the disciplines included more or less comprehensive. When it comes to party sympathies there are 1.3 academics on...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

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...

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...