Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective. As scholarly research is a mainly curiosity driven...

Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causal forces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of "university" and inadequate organizational forms for modern...

The official intention of the UNESCO World Heritage List is to protect the global heritage. However, the existing List is highly imbalanced according to countries and continents. Historical reasons, such as historical GDP, population, and number of years of high civilization, have a significant...

The digital revolution has led to a quantification of ever more areas of human life and society. At the same time, there is an explosion of the number of awards, which by their very nature are based on non-quantified performance. Will quantification take over completely, leading to...

In this paper, we integrate the identity of legislators in a politico-economic analysis of parliamentary oversight whereby oversight activities depend on individual control costs and incentives. We focus on public servants selected into parliament who face a conflict of interests but also have...

Countries differ substantially in how they deal with politicians that come from the public sector. Most constitutions include incompatibility and ineligibility rules due to concerns about conflicts of interest and the politicization of the public service. We study how these rules affect the...

High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular job security, in workers' well-being by exploiting sector-specific institutional differences...