Our 2020 conference will take place in an online environment on Thursday-Saturday, 11th-13th June 2020, hosted at the Department of Economics, Alpen-Adria-University of Klagenfurt/Celovec, Austria. The confirmed keynote speakers are: Pierpaolo […]
Paul Schweinzer, a micro-economist at the Department of Economics, is unable to say how happy the human species is and whether progress makes people happier. By focusing on the things that are most essential, however, he can calculate how to maximise the welfare of a society.
Paul Schweinzer, a micro-economist at the Department of Economics, is unable to say how happy the human species is and whether progress makes people happier. By focusing on the things that are most essential, however, he can calculate how to maximise the welfare of a society.
While the consequences of smoking, drinking alcohol, being active etc. have been carefully researched and are well understood as far as life expectancy is concerned, very few studies explore how individual decisions which result in becoming a parent or getting married influence the probability of dying and causes of death. Miguel Portela (Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal) and Paul Schweinzer (University of Klagenfurt, Austria) have recently conducted studies using data from Great Britain. Their biblically inspired conclusion is: “Let the little children come to me.”
At the Olympic Games in Sochi 2014, Russia’s ice hockey “dream team”, programmed for gold, lost to Finland during the quarter finals following a series of disappointing games. They were eliminated even though the team was effectively comprised entirely of superstars, the most powerful individual players from all of the nation’s teams. Was it a simple coincidence, or is there a systematic explanation?
Research conducted at state universities is mostly financed with public money: As such, knowledge is a public good and should therefore also be publically accessible. Tradition dictates that research results are published in scientific journals, which are of vital importance for the career paths of researchers. However, even today, these journals are usually published by large publishing houses, whose respective business models prescribe the raising of revenues from public libraries and academic institutions. This is the case even though almost all of the articles that come to be published are penned by researchers who are largely publically funded. What is more, to a significant extent, the selection and peer review process applied to the articles is also conducted by researchers who receive publically funded salaries. In most instances, the performance of these duties – generally considered to be part of the scope of reputable academic activities – goes unpaid. Meanwhile, over the past few years, the trend towards “open access” has steadily gained pace: Conventional journal contributions are either “bought out” from authors’ contracts and published in a publically accessible manner (green road), or articles appear in journals established specifically for this purpose, which are committed to the provision of open access (gold road). The first batch of open access journals following the “gold road” is now beginning to emerge in the economic sciences, among them the recently initiated “Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design”.
Daniel Waschnig
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