In Amartya Sen's capability approach, policy makers can focus on different levels to influence the well-being of a society. A dimension that is usually neglected is improving individuals’ “conversion efficiency”, i.e. the efficiency with which individual resources are converted into...

Behavioral economics has shown that individuals sometimes make decisions that are not in their best interests. This insight has prompted calls for behaviorally informed policy interventions popularized under the notion of "libertarian paternalism." This type of "soft" paternalism aims at helping...

Behavioral economics has shown that individuals sometimes make decisions that are not in their best interest. This insight has prompted calls for behaviorally-informed policy interventions popu-larized under the notion of "libertarian paternalism". This type of soft paternalism aims at helping...

Is the activity of volunteering something that benefits the volunteer as well as the recipient of the volunteer’s activities? We analyze this relationship and apply matching estimators to the large-scale British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set to estimate the causal impact of...

As a result of the disenchantment with traditional income-based measures of welfare, alternative welfare measures have gained increasing attention in recent years. Two of the most prominent measures of well-being come from subjective well-being research and the (objective) capability approach....

We present a form of soft paternalism called "autonomy-enhancing paternalism" that seeks to in-crease individual well-being by facilitating the individual ability to make critically reflected, au-tonomous decisions. The focus of autonomy-enhancing paternalism is on helping individuals to become...

Libertarian paternalists hold that biases and distortions in human decision-making justify paternalistic interference affecting individuals’ decisions. The aim of this paper is to analzye to what extent an evolutionary outlook supports libertarian paternalism. I will put forward three...

While standard economic theory takes individual preferences as stable and “given”, i.e., independent of situational context, real-world preferences tend to vary with changing opportunity sets. This is exemplified by Aesop’s fable of the fox and the sour grapes. This phenomenon of...

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...