Drawing on the three key relations in the capabilities approach (Sen, 1985) to welfare economics and using panel data from the English Longitudinal Survey of Aging, this paper illustrates how the capabilities approach to welfare economics can be used to understand wellbeing in older age....

Many initiatives worldwide aim at improving financial literacy through targeted education programs, yet there is little evidence regarding their effectiveness. We examine the impact of a short financial education program on teenagers in German high schools. Our findings reveal that the training...

In Bartling, Fehr and Schmidt (2012) we show theoretically and experimentally that it is optimal to grant discretion to workers if (i) discretion increases productivity, (ii) workers can be screened by past performance, (iii) some workers reciprocate high wages with high effort and (iv)...

We analyze committees of voters who take a decision between two options as a two stage process. In a discussion stage, voters share non verifiable information about a private signal concerning what is the best option. In a voting stage, votes are cast and one of the options is implemented. We...

We generalise and extend the work of Inarra and Laruelle (2011) by studying two person symmetric evolutionary games with two strategies, a heterogeneous population with two possible types of individuals and incomplete information. Comparing such games with their classic homogeneous version with...

Organic food markets in developed countries have been rapidly expanding in recent years. Though expected health benefits are a major motive for buying organic food (OF), the health effects of consuming OF are uncertain. This study uses survey data from Germany, 2007, to explore the causal...

Several European countries have reformed their labor market institutions. Incentive effects of unemployment benefits have been an important aspect of these reforms. We analyze this issue in a principal-agent model, focusing on unemployment levels and labor productivity. In our model, a higher...