Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore a number of issues pertaining to the conceptualisation, operationalisation, feasibility and effectiveness of workplace partnership arrangements in a non-unionised setting. Design/methodology/approach – The paper discusses the most common...

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

Doubts about the decidability of moral questions have often been used as an excuse for economists to eschew any normative propositions. Evolutionary economics, still lacking a well-developed normative branch, gives rise to a form of descriptive moral relativism. This paper wants to explore the...

Subjective well-being is a complex phenomenon coevolving with events in important do-mains of life. Panel vector autoregressions are a suitable tool to analyze the underlyingstructure of changes in happiness and its coevolution with changes in income, health, wor-ries, marital status and...

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

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...