Over the last 25 years, more than a hundred dictator game experiments have been published. This meta study summarizes the evidence. Exploiting the fact that most experiments had to fix parameters they did not intend to test, the meta study explores a rich set of control variables for...

This chapter presents an integrated economic approach that organizes and interprets the evidence on child development. It also discusses the indicators of child well-being that are used in international comparisons. Recent evidence on child development is summarized, and policies to promote...

This paper gives a survey of the experimental literature on the perception (bias) of individuals with respect to their own tax burden and its effect on economic decisions. Six strands of literature are discussed: (1) perception of marginal tax rates, (2) influence of tax complexity on tax...

Behavioral economics attempts to integrate insights from psychology, neuroscience, and sociology in order to better predict individual outcomes and develop more effective policy. While the field has been successfully applied to many areas, education has, so far, received less attention - a...

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...

Der vorliegende Beitrag ist eine Kurzfassung zur Studie I im Rahmen des Projektes Eckpunkte eines ökologisch tragfähigen Wohlfahrtskonzepts als Grundlage für umweltpolitische Innovations- und Transformationsprozesse für das Bundesumweltministerium (BMU). Die Auswertung hatte zum Ziel,...

Die hier vorgestellten Überlegungen nehmen direkt Bezug auf die im Zuge der projektinternen Synopse identifizierten Unzulänglichkeiten aktuell diskutierter Wohlfahrts- und grüner Wachstumskonzepte in ihrem Verhältnis zu dem bislang in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland etablierten...

What makes people happy in life? This is a crucial question that has the potential to shake up economics. In recent years, the dissatisfaction with the understanding of welfare in economics together with the new opportunities to empirically study people's subjective wellbeing have spurred...

Policies and explicit private incentives designed for self-regarding individuals sometimes are less effective or even counterproductive when they diminish altruism, ethical norms and other social preferences. Evidence from 51 experimental studies indicates that this crowding out effect is...

I offer a selective review of discounting and climate policy. Analytic and numerical models show that different assumptions greatly change the degree to which decisions about climate policy depend on the discount rate. I discuss a claim that standard models exaggerate the current generation's...