Bruno S. Frey (born 4 May 1941 in Basel, Switzerland) is a Swiss economist and visiting professor for Political Economy at the University of Basel. Frey's research topics include Political economy and Happiness economics, with his published work including concepts derived from Psychology, Sociology, Jurisprudence, History, Arts, and Theology.
Frey studied economics at the University of Basel and at the University of Cambridge, obtaining a doctorate in economics in 1965. From 1969 to 2010 Frey was an associate professor of economics at the University of Basel, from 1977 to 2012 a professor of economics at the University of Zurich, and since 1969 has held editor positions at Kyklos , a Swiss journal on political economy. Since 2004 Frey has been a director of research for the Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA). [1] Starting from 2010 until 2013, Frey was appointed to the Warwick Business School in the role of a Dinstinguished Professor of Behavioural Science. [2]
Frey was appointed to the Copenhagen Consensus expert commission in 2004, alongside four Nobel Prize winners. The main goal of this commission was to assess priorities for addressing the main challenges facing humanity including hunger, AIDS, water access, trade barriers, corruption, and global warming. [3]
In July 2011, the University of Zurich established a commission to investigate allegations of publication misconduct (self-plagiarism) by Frey and his co-authors. In October of the same year the commission reported that Frey had committed misconduct, namely self-plagiarism. [4] In July 2012, the Faculty of Business, Economics and Management at the University of Zurich decided to not extend the employment contract Frey had after having become emeritus professor.
In 2012, the government of Bhutan appointed Frey to an international group of experts to investigate "a new development paradigm designed to nurture human happiness and the wellbeing of all life on earth." [5]
According to the RePEc-Ranking from October 2015, he is listed as the 14th most cited European economist. [6] Additionally, the Swiss newspaper, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, publishes regularly a rating measuring the academic success and the public perception in the media and politics of economists. In this rating, he was appointed as the 3rd most influential economist in Switzerland in 2014 and 2015. [7]
In a recent publication from Miha Dominko and Miroslav Verbič titled "The Economics of Subjective Well-Being: A Bibliometric Analysis" and published in the Journal of Happiness Studies in 2019, the authors examined the development of subjective well-being research. Their result from Table 3. "50 most cited articles in the economics of subjective well-being research" B. S. Frey and A. Stutzer's article "What can economists learn from happiness research?" was placed on the very first place. [8]
According to "Economists’ Impact Ranking" (Ökonomen-Einfluss-Ranking) in NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) of September 21, 2019, Bruno S. Frey achieved Rank 4 in Switzerland (in terms of research output: Rank 2) and according to "Germany's most influential Economists" in F.A.Z (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) of September 21, 2019: Rank 5 in Germany. [9] [10] In Handelsblatt’s “Economics Ranking 2019", September 16, 2019, he was placed in terms of "lifetime achievement" on the 1st Rank. [11]
Frey's published research has included topics related to behavioral economics (including motivational crowding effects [12] [13] [14] [15] ), the economics of awards, [16] [17] political economics, [18] the economics of happiness, [19] [20] the effects of democracy upon society, [21] [22] [23] corporate governance, [24] community enterprises, [25] and the economics of war. [26] [27]
Frey is author of more than a dozen books in English and/or German (including a number of translations into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese) and more than 300 articles in professional academic journals. [28] [29]
Concerning the role of direct democracy, he developed (together with Reiner Eichenberger) a functionally oriented form of federalism called Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdiction (FOCJ). He considers both direct democracy and federalism as trend-setting institutions of the future.
Frey has also contributed to the organization of theaters, operas, and museums, as well as the return on investment in works of art. He finds that the latter are less financially rewarding compared to other investments. Such investments are nevertheless made because a psychological return also takes place in the process. [30] According to the economics publication database IDEAS, Frey is a world leader in research in the field of cultural economics. [31]
As a further contribution to cultural economics, Bruno S. Frey has published a book entitled "Venice is Everywhere". The phenomenon of "overtourism" is treated as a central theme. In this context, economic aspects such as externalities or behavioral incentives and their role for the institutional framework are discussed. In addition, Frey (with Andre Briviba) has published two academic papers on the topic (Revived Originals - A proposal to deal with cultural overtourism; A policy proposal to deal with excessive cultural tourism). [32] [33]
During 2010 and 2011 Frey, with co-authors Benno Torgler and David Savage, published four articles concerning the Titanic disaster in four different journals. Concerning these articles, in 2011 Frey and his co-authors were accused of self-plagiarism. [34] [35] [36] On 3 May 2011 David Autor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, wrote a public letter [37] to Frey claiming "very substantial overlap between these articles and your JEP publication. Indeed, to my eye, they are substantively identical." Pointing out that the other articles were not cited, Autor further wrote that "your conduct in this matter [is] ethically dubious and disrespectful to the American Economic Association, the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the JEP's readers." In a public response Frey accepted theses accusations and offered his apologies, [37] writing, "[i]t was a grave mistake on our part for which we deeply apologize. It should never have happened. This is deplorable."
Heterodox economics is any economic thought or theory that contrasts with orthodox schools of economic thought, or that may be beyond neoclassical economics. These include institutional, evolutionary, feminist, social, post-Keynesian, ecological, Austrian, complexity, Marxian, socialist, and anarchist economics.
Ernst Fehr is an Austrian-Swiss behavioral economist and neuroeconomist and a Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economic Research, as well as the vice chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. His research covers the areas of the evolution of human cooperation and sociality, in particular fairness, reciprocity and bounded rationality.
Hans-Werner Sinn is a German economist who served as President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research from 1999 to 2016. He currently serves on the German economy ministry’s advisory council. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich.
Economic methodology is the study of methods, especially the scientific method, in relation to economics, including principles underlying economic reasoning. In contemporary English, 'methodology' may reference theoretical or systematic aspects of a method. Philosophy and economics also takes up methodology at the intersection of the two subjects.
Applied economics is the study as regards the application of economic theory and econometrics in specific settings. As one of the two sets of fields of economics, it is typically characterized by the application of the core, i.e. economic theory and econometrics to address practical issues in a range of fields including demographic economics, labour economics, business economics, industrial organization, agricultural economics, development economics, education economics, engineering economics, financial economics, health economics, monetary economics, public economics, and economic history. From the perspective of economic development, the purpose of applied economics is to enhance the quality of business practices and national policy making.
David Ernest William Laidler is an English/Canadian economist who has been one of the foremost scholars of monetarism. He published major economics journal articles on the topic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book, The Demand for Money, was published in four editions from 1969 through 1993, initially setting forth the stability of the relationship between income and the demand for money and later taking into consideration the effects of legal, technological, and institutional changes on the demand for money. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.
The economics of happiness or happiness economics is the theoretical, qualitative and quantitative study of happiness and quality of life, including positive and negative affects, well-being, life satisfaction and related concepts – typically tying economics more closely than usual with other social sciences, like sociology and psychology, as well as physical health. It typically treats subjective happiness-related measures, as well as more objective quality of life indices, rather than wealth, income or profit, as something to be maximized.
Daniel W. Bromley is an economist, the former Anderson-Bascom Professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and since 2009, Emeritus Professor. His research in institutional economics explains the foundations of property rights, natural resources and the environment; and economic development. He has been editor of the journal Land Economics since 1974.
Margit Osterloh is a German and Swiss economist.
Martin Ravallion was an Australian economist. He was the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Professor of Economics at Georgetown University, and had previously been director of the research department at the World Bank. He held a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics.
Rüdiger Frank is a German economist and expert on North Korea and East Asia. He currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria, as a tenured full professor of East Asian economy and society at the University of Vienna. Frank also serves as the head of the Department of East Asian Studies in Vienna and is an adjunct professor at Korea University and at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
Iris Bohnet is a Swiss behavioral economist, and the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and the Academic Dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her work focuses primarily on issues of gender, trust, and social preferences.
Stefano Zamagni is an Italian economist. Born in Rimini, Zamagni is Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna. Zamagni is also a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association and President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Kyklos is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by John Wiley & Sons It was established in 1947 by Edgar Salin and is attached to the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Basel. The journal views economics as a social science and favours contributions dealing with issues relevant to contemporary society, as well as economic policy applications.
Thomas MacGillivray Humphrey is an American economist. Until 2005 he was a research advisor and senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and editor of the Bank's flagship publication, the Economic Quarterly. His publications cover macroeconomics, monetary economics, and the history of economic thought. Mark Blaug called him the "undisputed master" of British classical monetary thought.
Teppo Felin is the Douglas D. Anderson Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. He is also the Founding Director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Study. From 2013 to 2021, Felin was Professor of Strategy at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on cognition, rationality, perception, organizational economics, markets and strategy.
Pavlina R. Tcherneva is an American economist, of Bulgarian descent, working as associate professor of economics at Bard College. She is also a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute and expert at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Anthony de Jasay was a Hungarian writer, economist, and right-libertarian philosopher. He studied in Székesfehérvár and Budapest, and obtained a degree in agriculture. He then worked as a freelance journalist, but emigrated from Hungary in 1948 after the Communist government nationalized his father's farm.
Marcel Fafchamps is a Belgian economist and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He belongs to the leading economists in the field of rural development.
Tobias Thomas is a German economist and Director General of Statistics Austria.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)