While there is little doubt that innovations drive economic growth, their effects on well-being are less clear. One reason for this are ambivalent effects of innovations on well-being that result from pecuniary and technological externalities of innovations, argued to be inevitable. Another...

Although decision makers are often reported to have difficulties in making comparisons between multi-dimensional decision outcomes, economic theory assumes a uni-dimensional utility measure. This paper reviews evidence from behavioral and brain sciences to assess whether, and for what reasons,...

Innovations are inherently connected to knowledge transfers. The need of face-to-face contacts to transfer tacit knowledge is commonly argued to cause a regional dimension of innovative activities. The paper presents an alternative explanation based on a model of boundedly rational actors who...

In recent economic literature, there has been an increasing interest in modelling preferences as endogenous. Some arguments go along the lines that institutions shape preferences. This paper suggests that adopting a more substantive concept of preferences furthers our understanding of how they...

The concept of utility is often used in ambiguous ways in economics, from having substantive psychological connotations to being a formal placeholder representing a person's preferences. In the accounts of the early utilitarians, it was a multidimensional measure that has been condensed during...

In the literature on Sen's capability approach, studies focussing on the empirical measurement of conversion factors are comparatively rare. We add to this field by adopting a measure of 'conversion efficiency' that captures the efficiency with which individuals convert their re-sources into...

We use a panel vector autoregressions model to examine the coevolution of changes in happiness and changes in income, health, marital status as well as employment status for the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set. This technique allows us to simultaneously analyze the impact of the...

This paper examines the politicization of the United Nations Security Council (SC) and seeks to explore the causes and effects of this process. I will first demonstrate that the SC has expanded both its scope and authority after the end of the Cold War. With the SC becoming more powerful I then...

How did the international community respond to violent humanitarian crises and gross violations of human rights after the end of the Cold War? While from an optimistic perspective on global governance it is argued that humanitarian crises have been increasingly addressed, skeptics maintain that...

In diesem Discussion-paper wird das Forschungsprogramm der Abteilung „Transnationale Konflikte und internationale Institutionen“ (TKI) vorgestellt. Das Forschungsprogramm richtet den Blick auf eine Entwicklungsdynamik, die durch die Errichtung der internationalen Institutionen nach dem...