InBeyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative Read more…
We study a bonus pay setting where a principal hires a supervisor to evaluate a group of potentially shirking workers. The supervisor and her workers develop relational feelings (either positive or negative) after interacting with each other. We analyze a novel class of organizational infractions where the supervisor provides false Read more…
Many years ago, Emmanuel Todd came up with a classification of family types and argued that the historically prevalent family types in a society have important consequences for its economic, political, and social development. Here, we evaluate Todd’s most important predictions empirically. Relying on a parsimonious model with exogenous covariates, Read more…
Constitutional democracy is in decline and many would-be autocrats try to transgress constitutional constraints. Here, we introduce the concept of militant constitutionalism, which suggests a number of constitutional rules that could make constitutions more resilient to attempts to undermine them. A first empirical evaluation, however, can link only few constitutional Read more…
(Publication only available in German) Dieses Buch beleuchtet aus interdisziplinärer und ländervergleichender Perspektive, unter welchen Bedingungen direkte Demokratie funktionieren kann, wo ihre Chancen und Risiken liegen und welche Rolle dabei die politische Bildung, die politische Kulturtradition eines Landes, der Zusammenhang von Entscheidung und Verantwortung und der Grad der Kleinräumigkeit und Read more…
We draw on David Hume’s essays on happiness to extend ideas about welfare, preferences, and the social role of behavioral welfare economists in Mario Rizzo’s and Glen Whitman’s (2020)Escaping Paternalism. Through literary dialogue, Hume illustrates that individuals have different perspectives on the good life. These perspectives cannot be resolved by Read more…
In this paper, we analyse Hayek’s views on endogenous preferences. Perhaps surprisingly in the light of his remarks that economists ought to take people’s preferences as given, there are several places in Hayek’s economics and political economy where preference endogeneity plays a significant role. We begin by documenting those cases, providing an Read more…
This work looks at the policies aimed at promoting female participation in local legislative bodies using a series of changes to electoral law in Poland. We use a difference-in-discontinuities design to examine the effect of an introduction of a female quota on female participation in local councils. We find that Read more…