Kyklos最新文献

Increased wages and productivity associated with performance pay can be beneficial to both employers and employees. However, performance pay can also entail unintended consequences for workers' well-being. This study is the first to systematically examine the association between performance pay and loneliness, a significant policy-relevant social well-being concern. Using representative survey data from Germany, I show that performance pay is significantly associated with increased loneliness. Correspondingly, performance pay is negatively associated with the social life satisfaction of workers. Investigating the transmission channels reveals work hours, earnings, conflict with coworkers, and conflict with the life partner as important mediators. The key findings also hold in sensible instrumental variable estimations, addressing the potential endogeneity of performance pay and in various robustness checks. Finally, implications are discussed.

This article explores the diversity of cultural and policy contexts in Western European countries and examines their role in explaining the persistent and heterogeneous motherhood penalty. Using harmonized European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data from 13 countries, the analysis spans 2006 to 2022 and provides average and distributional results. The findings reveal a motherhood penalty in 10 countries, with the highest levels observed in Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Austria. For these countries, quantile regressions show a decreasing motherhood penalty along the earnings distribution. The empirical analysis further sheds light on how work–family policies, culture, minimum wages, and wage-setting institutions mediate the role of motherhood on women's earnings. The results indicate that while work–family policies promote female employment, they do not significantly mitigate the motherhood penalty. In contrast, higher minimum wages and more coordinated and centralized wage bargaining are more effective in reducing the motherhood penalty, particularly in the lower segment of the earnings distribution. More traditional gender roles and cultural values emphasizing masculinity, individualism, and power distance are associated with a lower motherhood penalty.

Does studying mainstream microeconomics cause individuals to behave more like the textbook version of homo economicus? Most studies suggesting a positive answer have used student samples and focused on self-interested behaviors in collective dilemma situations. In our study, we conducted an online “beauty contest” experiment with a sample of 1019 academic economists in Russia. The Russian case is of particular interest in this context, as the country's economic discipline is markedly divided between those who associate themselves with “Western” science—typically having received standard training in mainstream economics—and those who reject it in favor of a native intellectual tradition. The latter group usually openly denies the universal applicability of theories that describe economic life as an interaction between rational, self-interested agents. We leverage this division by examining variations in beauty contest game strategies within the group of academic economists rather than across disciplines, thereby reducing unobserved heterogeneity. We analyze whether those who embrace the international economic mainstream make choices closer to equilibrium compared to those who reject it and specifically describe homo economicus as an inadequate model of human behavior. The results show no statistical association: Economists who rely on theories assuming common knowledge of rationality did not expect more rational behavior from their colleagues.

In the current research work, we intend to analyse the effect of music on developing students' academic performance, self-concept and emotional development. We work with experimental data gathered from an application of special music lessons at schools aimed at developing students' learning and at educating their emotions in the academic year 2018–2019. These music lessons consisted of collective, cooperative, practical, and experiential musical activities. Our results show that this intervention had a positive influence on students' emotional development; nevertheless, it does not seem to influence students' academic achievement or their self-concept.

This article proposes that wars are fought to bring about and monitor mutual reductions of overinvestment in broadly defined military preparedness. If two potential combatants are overinvested in military preparedness, it is in their individual interest to scale down in order to use their resources in politically more desirable ways. However, unilateral disarmament exposes one to the risk of extortion by the not-yet-disarmed side. Wars can therefore be a politically desirable way of monitoring the other side's disarmament. This hypothesis predicts fewer civilian deaths from war the more specialized the combatants are, the exceeding rarity of three-way wars, and also offers a number of additional implications.

Do richer individuals allocate their time to activities that result in higher levels of happiness? Do people experience different levels of happiness for the same activities based on their income levels? This study offers a comprehensive examination of these questions, drawing from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). Our findings reveal that income shapes individuals' allocation of time, but “money does not buy happier time.” We find evidence that high-income women and in general high-income people during weekends and holidays tend to allocate more time in activities that lead to higher experiential well-being. Yet, interestingly, we find that the subjective well-being derived by rich people from the activities they perform more frequently is substantially lower than the one experienced by an average US resident when performing the same activities. Happiness associated with the use of time seems to be in the eyes of the beholder, as we find that subjective happiness differences between rich and poor are explained by different preferences over similar activities (time use preference channel) rather than a different allocation of time (activity-composition channel).