Our friend and colleague Rüdiger Dornbusch passed away before he was able tocomplete his book based on the Munich Lectures in Economics that he gave inNovember 17, 1998, at the Center for Economic Studies of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.The lectures contain a fascinating overview of the...

The Lisbon strategy of the year 2000 failed: the share of R&D spending in Europe remains below the 3 percent of GDP target, far behind that of the US and China. EU companies spend much less on R&D than their US peers and concentrate their innovation activities on midtech instead high-tech...

We build a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. The presence of rewards or punishments creates doubt as to the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this 'overjustification...

We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or image-related) create doubt about the true motive for which good deeds are performed and this...

We analyze social and economic phenomena involving beliefs which people value and invest in, for affective or functional reasons. Individuals are at times uncertain about their own deep values and infer them from their past choices, which then come to define who they are". Identity investments...

Society's demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the psychology and economics of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend, which...

Society's demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the 'psychology and economics' of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend, which...

The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...