We study the cultural foundations of management practices, which are increasingly recognized as important determinants of firm performance. This research closes the loop on two developing literatures, one seeking cultural explanations for economic development and the other seeking to account for...

Evidence on Weber's original thesis on a Protestant work ethic is ambiguous and relies on questionable measures of work attitudes. We test the relation between Protestantism and work attitudes using a novel method, operationalizing work ethic as the effect of unemployment on individuals’...

The aim of this symposium is to move beyond the established, narrow measures of well-being. It does so by bringing together insights from the happiness approach and the capability approach, both of which are at the forefront of theorizing on welfare in economics. The reason is that the...

We assess the organizational culture in the finance industry in relation to the global financial crisis (GFC) and consider the potential of cultural change to improve the financial sector. To avoid (response) biases, we build on the person-organization (P-O) fit literature and develop a novel,...

I propose and test a bottom-up channel through which trust between parties to an exchange can go on to affect comparative economic development of societies as a whole. My approach revolves around the autonomy that employers (principals) grant to workers (agents), which is a key feature of...

Over the centuries happiness, or more broadly, well-being has been subject of unremitting debate. Recently, measures of so-called subjective well-being (SWB; e.g. self-reported happiness) have gained prominence and are receiving increasing attention from scientists, policy makers and the public...

The income-leisure trade-off, whilst prominent in textbooks, is largely absent in the income-happiness debate. Multilevel or hierarchical linear modeling is introduced and used to investigate the income-leisure-happiness nexus. Leisure has a positive effect on happiness, but lowers the effect of...

Empirical work has refuted the prediction of new or endogenous growth theory that growth exhibits a scale effect: the rate of growth has not accelerated and larger countries do not grow faster than smaller countries do. The theoretical dimensions of this ‘scale effects problem' have been...