Adult Outcomes for Children of Teenage Mothers Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, this study examines the relationship between several outcomes in early adulthood (e.g., education, inactivity, earnings, and health) and being born to a teenage mother. Besides standard cross-sectional multivariate regression estimates, we also present evidence from nonparametric estimates and fro...

Happiness research in economics takes reported subjective well-being as a proxy measure for utility and has already provided many interesting insights about human well-being and its determinants. We argue that future research on happiness in economics has a lot of potential, but that it needs to be guided more by theory. We propose two ways to test theories of happiness, and illustrate them wit...

Happiness and Economic Growth: The Evidence Long term trends in happiness and income are not related; short term fluctuations in happiness and income are positively associated. Evidence for this is found in time series data for developed countries, transition countries, and less developed countries, whether analyzed separately or pooled. Skeptics, who claim that the long term time series trend ...

Using data from the U.S. General Social Survey, we study the role of income and status in self-reported happiness. Unexpected income gains increase happiness and relative income is more important than absolute income, in particular, income relative to individuals’ own cohort working in the same occupation in the same region. Perceptions about relative income are more important than actual relat...

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals, after life and labour market events, tend to return to some baseline level of wellbeing? Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, we find significant lag and lead effects. We conclude that there...

Religious Minorities and Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from Rural West Bengal Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India concentration of religi...

The present paper thoroughly explores second-best efficient allocations in an adverse selection insurance economy. We start from a natural extension of the classical model, assuming less than perfect risk perceptions. We propose first and second welfare theorems, by means of which we describe efficiencyenhancing policies. Notions of weak and strong adverse selection are promising for interpreti...

in welfare economic studies, because of the differences among households scale, we cannot consider household expenditures without attention to this factor. a simple method to consider household scale in welfare analysis is the usage of the per capita expenditure. but, the usage of per capita expenditure ignores economies of scale. in fact, per capita expenditure is a biased variable, and underv...

Sundays Are Blue: Aren’t They? The Day-of-the-Week Effect on Subjective Well-Being and Socio-Economic Status This paper analyses whether individuals are influenced by the day of the week when reporting subjective well-being. By using a large panel data set and controlling for observed and unobserved individual characteristics, we find a large day-of the-week effect. Overall, we find a ‘blue’ Su...