Money doesn’t seem to make us happy for reasons of social comparison and habituation. But does that necessarily mean that we would be better off doing something else instead? This paper suggests that the phenomena of comparison and habituation are actually found in a variety of economic and social activities, rendering policy conclusions more difficult. JEL Classification Codes: D01, D31, H00, ...

This paper analyses the relationship between governance, asset allocation, and risk among state and local government-operated pension systems in the United States. It is argued that governance influences investment decisions and risk profiles of public sector pension systems, creating the potential for agency problems to exist between decision makers, plan members, and taxpayers. JEL Codes: J2,...

I provide a typology of social capital, breaking it down into seven more fundamental forms of capital: information capital, brokerage capital, coordination and leadership capital, bridging capital, favor capital, reputation capital, and community capital. I discuss how most of these forms of social capital can be identified using different network-based measures. JEL Classification Codes: D85, ...

The financial trilemma states that financial stability, financial integration and national financial policies are incompatible. Any two of the three objectives can be combined but not all three; one has to give. This paper develops a model to underpin the financial trilemma. Our findings for financial integration suggest that the financial trilemma is in particular at work in Europe. JEL codes:...

Through an experiment, we investigate how the level of rationality relates to concerns for equality and efficiency. Subjects perform dictator games and a guessing game. More rational subjects are not more frequently of the selfregarding type. When performing a comparison within the same degree of rationality, self-regarding subjects show more strategic sophistication than other subjects. JEL co...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to document the use and the diffusion of the “new” compensation and work organisation practices in Danish private sector firms and second, to examine how and why firms differ regarding the adoption of different schemes. The analysis is based on a detailed mail questionnaire answered by 1,600 Danish private sector firms. JEL Codes: J33, J41, L23

This paper considers political credibility of allocations in settings with dynamic private information. It embeds a benchmark dynamic moral environment into political economy games which feature repeated voting over mechanisms. Optimal politically credible allocations are shown to solve virtual planning problems with social discount factors in excess of the private one. JEL codes: C73, D72, D82...

The rise in online social networking has brought about a revolution in social relations. However, its effects on offline interactions and its implications for collective well-being are still not clear and are under-investigated. We study the ecology of online and offline interaction in an evolutionary game framework where individuals can adopt different strategies of socialization. Our main res...

Recent work drawing on data for large and small firms has shown a Pareto distribution of firm size. We mix a Gibrat-type growth process among incumbents with an exponential distribution of firm’s age, to obtain the empirical Pareto distribution. JEL codes: L20, L25

Several recent papers have proposed recursive Lagrangian-basedmethods for solving dynamic contracting problems. Thesemethods give rise to Bellman operators that incorporate either a dual inf-sup or a saddle point operation. We give conditions that ensure the Bellman operator implied by a dual recursive formulation is contractive. JEL codes: C61, C73, D82, E61.