People care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper provides evidence on how the relative income position affects professional sports performances. Our analysis suggests that if a...

The measurement of preferences is an ongoing challenge for economists. New insights can be won by relying on reported subjective well-being in addition to observed behaviour. Empirical estimates of well-being functions, based on a sample of 5500 Swiss residents, find that unemployed persons are...

The risk of external interventions crowding-out intrinsic motivation has long been established in economics. This paper introduces a new dimension by arguing that a crowding-out effect does become possible if individuals receive higher relative compensation. Using a unique, large data set that...

Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulus to the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective wellbeing is often taken as a proxy measure for...

Culture has attributes of a global public good that needs to be preserved for mankind as a whole. World Culture Certificates are proposed to efficiently preserve World Heritage. The community of nations has to agree on the Global Heritage List and how much each nation is to contribute to that...

The standard model of tax evasion based on the subjective expected utility maximization does not perform particularly well in econometric analyses: it predicts too little evasion and produces unsatisfactory econometric parameter estimates. The model is extended by looking at how the tax...