Browsing by Subject "Economics"

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Animal welfare in non-anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis and social welfare functions: A critical review to guide practical application
(2024-10) Dusel, Sara; Wieck, Christine
Cost-benefit analysis and social welfare functions are two closely related methods to evaluate impacts of policies on humans (producers, consumers etc.) and animals. In cost-benefit analysis, the impacts on animals are currently either disclosed as intangible impacts or monetised from the human (anthropocentric) perspective through production costs, revenues and willingness to pay. Social welfare functions are more flexible to aggregate and trade-off impacts on animals, but they are not yet applied in practice. In the literature, advances have been made to monetise policy impacts from the animals’ (non-anthropocentric) perspective and to include animals in social welfare functions. Yet, policy analysts who seek to implement any of these approaches in practice face substantial challenges because the available studies differ considerably in the methodologies and underlying normative assumptions. We conduct a critical review of the scientific and grey literature with the aim to synthesise the available material, to facilitate an informed debate on conflicting normative assumptions, and to eventually guide the practical application of non-anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis and social welfare functions. The results of the critical review are presented in the form of a checklist that allows to better comprehend key steps of the methodologies. Step-by-step, the checklist gives an overview of the alternative options and normative assumptions in the literature, and points to any remaining research gaps. Beside the academic debate, this is relevant for practical policy analysts who need to make methodological choices for their policy questions at hand.
Incentives to enforce and stimulate : microeconometric evidence from natural experiments
(2020) Treber, Lukas; Dwenger, Nadja
Incentives can be powerful tools to enforce behavior and to stimulate and steer the economy. However, due to the complexity of how incentives are perceived by economic agents, designing effective incentive structures is difficult. A better understanding of incentives enables policymakers to design such policies, ultimately increasing overall well-being. This thesis advances our knowledge on how incentives work, how they change behavior, and how to effectively use them.
Social capital from an individual perspective
(2018) Neidhardt, Jan; Ahlheim, Michael
Three contributions to the social capital literature are presented in this thesis: Firstly, a concept of social capital that is compatible with the individual perspective prominent in neoclassical economics is identified. Secondly, a new tool to measure individual social capital is developed and applied. Thirdly, results on the distributional effects of a great number of predictors on individual level social capital are obtained and discussed for a representative sample of the German resident population.