Are Youths on Income Support Less Happy? Evidence from Australia The central research question addressed in this paper is how receipt of income support payments affects the well-being of youths. Using 1997-2004 panel data from a nationally representative survey of Australian youths, we attempt to estimate the size of the welfare stigma faced by Australian youths, where stigma is defined as the ...

There is increasing interest in the ‘‘economics of happiness’’, reflected by the number of articles that are appearing in mainstream economics journals that consider subjective well-being (SWB) and its determinants. This paper provides a detailed review of this literature. It focuses on papers that have been published in economics journals since 1990, as well as some key reviews in psychology a...

Economists tend to adopt an empiricist approach to poverty, commonly calculating it as the proportion of the population that fall below some speci®ed income threshold. This approach has been developed to take into account heterogeneous household needs by using income equivalence scales, but most other individual characteristics are totally ignored. This paper questions the relevance of this app...

Disagreement in Partners’ Reports of Financial Difficulty We use unique data in which both partners report about household finances to demonstrate that there is often disagreement about whether the household has experienced financial difficulty in the past year. Four alternative explanations for this disagreement are tested using the data. The results indicate that disagreement may be related t...

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, and this reduced the global poverty line relative to the US dollar. The recent large increase of nearly half a billion poor people came from an i...

Relative Income, Happiness and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles The well-known Easterlin paradox points out that average happiness has remained constant over time despite sharp rises in GNP per head. At the same time, a micro literature has typically found positive correlations between individual income and individual measures of subjective well-being. This pa...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microfinance programs. It utilises a new, large and unique panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers. We employ different estimation strategies including trip...

Why Does Unemployment Hurt the Employed? Evidence from the Life Satisfaction Gap between the Public and the Private Sector * High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular job security, in workers’ well-being by exploiting sector-specific ins...

How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple’s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behavior that permits identificati...

This paper concentrates on the complex interplay between poverty, wealth and life satisfaction. Main areas of life are quantified in a multidimensional approach of poverty and wealth: Individual income, current health, occupational autonomy or employment status and life satisfaction. The analyzed data was taken from the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) at the German Institute for Econom...