It is generally understood that people care about their absolute income position, and several studies have in fact moved beyond this, showing that people also place considerable signifcance on their relative income position. However, empirical evidence about the behavioural consequences is...

Does Open Source (OS) represent a new innovation model, and under what conditions can it be employed in other contexts? A look into history shows that OS isn?t a unique example of what is called ?collective invention?. Other examples are blast furnaces in Britain?s Cleveland district, steam...

The billionaires of the world attract significant attention from the media and the public. The popular press is full of books selling formulas on how to become rich. Surprisingly, only a limited number of studies have explored empirically the determinants of extraordinary wealth. Using a large...

The major funding source for fundamental scientific research in the Netherlands (NWO), reserves more than half of their research budget for grants for young researchers. Researchers, who received their doctorate more than 15 years ago, cannot apply. Apparently NWO believes in a negative...

The basic distinction made in this volume compares ?economic value?, expressed in monetary terms, to ?cultural value?, reflecting cultural, aesthetic and artistic significance. This paper makes a different distinction which is rarely made explicit but which is of central importance to the...

In parliament, individual representatives vote with a certain probability according to their constituents’ preferences. Thus, the mechanism of the Condorcet Jury Theorem can be fruitfully applied to parliamentary representation: The probability that a majority of representatives votes...

We match individual senators’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with 24 real referenda decisions on exactly the same issues with identical wording. This setting allows us to evaluate the median voter model’s quality with revealed constituents’ preferences. Results...

Liberal drug policy reform is often criticized for ‘sending the wrong message’, particularly to youth. Reform opponents argue that liberal policies such as decriminalisation and medical marijuana laws will cause marijuana to be perceived as less risky and lead to an increase in use....

We assess the effect of constituents’ preferences on legislators’ decisions within a quasiexperimental setting: In the Swiss referendum process, citizens and legislators reveal their preferences for legislative proposals. We match roll call votes of all Swiss legislators on 102...

First, the points of view of economists regarding falsificationism, scientific revolutions and scientific research programmes are discussed. Next, hardly debatable scientific progress regarding empirical economic research in recent decades is described. Then it is asked whether there have been...