Does social media negatively affect perceived relative living conditions?

People are prone to compare their assets with other persons of their social-reference group, especially above their rank (Boyce et al 2010). This leads to an important implication in explaining happiness: It´s not your income that makes you happy, it´s all about your income rank. An increasing income lacks in giving a person more happiness …

Does FDI trigger or hinder corruption?

Corruption  has been one of the high priority that international organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, the UN and OECD have become increasingly interested in the fight against. More economists are involved in studying the effects of corruption on economic growth as it is perceived as a detrimental to economy and sustainable development path. …

Poor Choices or Poor Analysis?

fA Critical Review of Food-Based Poverty Traps There’s an interesting tension between libertarianism and paternalism when we talk about the lives of the poor. One the one hand, certain analyses of poverty take a rather patronizing view of the poor. These approaches often feature some exogenously-defined “rationality” criteria which are supposed to advance the lives …

Economic field experiments in developing countries – Topics, methods and implications

One of the most important tools in development economics are field labs – economic laboratory experiments conducted in the field. In order to explain different aspects of poverty, growth and human development, assumptions about the preferences and strategic behavior of individual economic agents are essential. However, the continuously growing literature on economic experiments in developing …

The Economics of Patriotism

Economic theories have addressed hundreds of topics and rendered several findings over the last decades. One could argue that the discipline step by step take up almost all parts of human live which might be not suitable to its original frame. Regardless this inner discussion on economic imperialism, I wondered to which extent does patriotism …

How can nudges support sustainable behavior and what might be effective in this context?

About 45% of our everyday actions are behaviors that are not actively reflected upon. To alter sustainable behavior is where nudges can come into play. Dealing with this topic is motivated by a personal interest of the author of this blog in sustainable solutions. Nudges were first introduced into economic psychology by Thaler and Sunstein …

Dark side of Social norms and how to give up them

When we say social norms, we mean how our reflection network think and how they behave. Every community has different social and moral norms. In some societies, there are completely different norms and rules which are not acceptable for the rest of nations. In this blog post, I will discuss some of those social norms, …

Group’s influences

In order to solve detrimental outcomes resulting from behaviors and preferences, the microeconomic and behavioral literature often consider distinctly an individual alone and external factors which would influence his behavior. For instance wrong choices could be made because of poverty, starvation or low level of education. However, it might be inaccurate to depict individual’s characteristics …

Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (RoSCA) is it only for poor?! Case study of RoSCA ‘’Gamieya’’ in Egypt

The existence of formal and informal markets for credit is a common phenomenon in developing countries. Being originally from Egypt which is considered as a developing country, I decided to talk about RoSCAs where I grew up being surrounded with this kind of informal associations everywhere in the society. But wait!! What are RoSCAs? RoSCAs …

Is support for small firms in developing countries really in the interest of the specific countries?

“Formal SMEs contribute up to 60% of total employment and up to 40% of national income (GDP) in emerging economies.” (Bell, 2015) This quote, published by the Worldbank points out the high significance of small firms in developing countries. But amongst others they face one relevant problem: they cannot profit from economies of scale the …