We introduce social capital accumulation into a neoclassical model, showing how it differs from physical and human capital accumulation. We take the view that social capital is crucial to the enjoyment of socially provided goods and that it is mainly accumulated by means of participation to social activities. Under-investment in social capital may lead a growing economy to fall into a social po...

How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual’s wage within a comparison group. ‘Rank’ itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, ...

This is the supplement to the paper “The Macroeconomics of Health Savings Accounts” by the same authors. We present a short history of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), describe the solution algorithm, and illustrate details about the estimation technique for the Markov transition matrices of the health shocks. JEL: H51, I18, I38,

Traditional tools of welfare economics identify the envy-related welfare loss from conspicuous consumption only under very strong assumptions. Measured income and life satisfaction offers an alternative for estimating such consumption externalities. The approach is developed in the context of luxury car consumption (Ferraris and Porsches) in Switzerland. Results from household panel data and fi...

Does Relative Income Matter for the Very Poor? Evidence from Rural Ethiopia We studied whether relative income has an impact on subjective well-being among extremely poor people. Contrary to the findings in developed countries, where relative income has shown a significant and negative impact on subjective well-being, we cannot reject the hypothesis that relative income has no impact on subject...

We study the effect of political ideology on sustainable development, measured as investment in genuine wealth, in a dynamic panel of 79 countries between 1981 and 2013. We find that a switch from a left-wing or centrist government to a right-wing government has a robust positive and statistically significant effect on investment in genuine wealth. We find no evidence of opportunistic cycles in...

The well-known Baum-Eagon inequality I31 provides an effective iterative scheme for finding a local maximum for homogeneous polynomials with positive coefticients over a domain of probability values. However, in many applications we are interested in maximizing a general rational function. We extend the Baum-Eagon inequality to rational functions. We briefly describe some of the applications of...

How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual’s wage within a comparison group. ‘Rank’ itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, ...