Perspectives from the Happiness Literature and the Role of New Instruments for Policy Analysis After having been ignored for a long time by economists, happiness is becoming an object of serious research in 21 century economics. In Section 2 we sketch the present status of happiness economics. In Section 3 we consider the practical applicability of happiness economics, retaining the assumption ...

In this work, I construct an extended model of the Heckscher-Ohlin model, in which there is an assignment problem of how to assign workers to two types of endowments, skilled and unskilled labor. In the comparative statics for a small open economy, when product prices change, the outputs change more than in the HeckscherOhlin model. In the comparative statics for a whole economy, when consumer ...

In this paper, the equivalence scale elasticity will be estimated by using individual panel data on income satisfaction from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP). Satisfaction or happiness data have been more frequently used by economists in recent years to analyze individual well-being. The approach differs from other subjective approaches as respondents are requested to evaluate curr...

The Persistence of Informality: Evidence from Panel Data Informality is a growing phenomenon in the developing and transition country labor market context. In particular, it is noticeable that working in an informal employment relationship is often not temporary. The degree of persistence of informality in the labor market might be due to different sources: structural state dependence due to pa...

This paper first identifies the determinants of income satisfaction of individuals within the household and, secondly, characterises whether their preferences are altruistic or egoistic. To that end, it formulates a theoretical framework from the collective family model whose stochastic formulations are estimated for 14 EU countries by using the eight waves of the European Community Household P...

In a simple conceptual framework, we organize a multitude of phenomena related to the (mis)prediction of utility. Consequences in terms of distorted choices and lower wellbeing emerge if people have to trade-off between alternatives that are characterized by attributes satisfying extrinsic desires and alternatives serving intrinsic needs. Thereby the neglect of asymmetries in adaptation is prop...

This paper assesses the impact of 30 years of globalization on gender equity in well-being in Latin America and the Caribbean. Data indicate that while some gaps in well-being have narrowed, progress is uneven across a set of nine indicators, and in some cases, conditions have worsened. Despite the optimism of market proponents, growth is not found to be an equalizer for gender anymore than it ...

Daylight savings time (DST) represents a public good with costs and benefits. We provide the first comprehensive examination of the welfare effects of the spring and autumn transitions for the UK and Germany. Using individual-level data and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the effect of the transitions on life satisfaction. Our results show that individuals in both the UK and Germ...

We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity, where we are able to differentiate between individuals who vary in religiosity between secular...

Increasing evidence from the empirical economic and psychological literature suggests that positive and negative well-being are more than opposite ends of the same phenomenon. Two separate measures of the dependent variable may be needed when analyzing the determinants of subjective well-being. We argue that this conclusion reflects in part the use of too restrictive econometric models. A flexi...