Money doesn’t seem to make us happy for reasons of social comparison and habituation. But does that necessarily mean that we would be better off doing something else instead? This paper suggests that the phenomena of comparison and habituation are actually found in a variety of economic and social activities, rendering policy conclusions more difficult. JEL Classification Codes: D01, D31, H00, ...

Based on Lewbel, Chiappori and Browning (2002), this paper summarizes how the use of collective models of household behavior can overcome the identiÞcation problems associated with the construction and estimation of adult equivalence scales. JEL codes: K1, D1, J17, C30, I31.

This paper investigates immigrant assortative mating and relationship satisfaction. Using a modifi ed random eff ects ordered probit model, the paper demonstrates that spouses of mixed couples are signifi cantly less satisfi ed with their partner than nativeonly and foreign-only couples. JEL Classifi cation: F22, I31

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under utilitarianism is equality of incomes. JEL classification: H0, I0, I30, I31

We characterize a family of r-extended generalized Lorenz dominance quasi-orderings and a family of r-Gini welfare orderings, on the basis of two allegedly “incompatible” axioms for heterogeneous welfare comparisons (Ebert, 1997, Ebert and Moyes, 2003, Shorrocks, 1995), but at the cost of either completeness or separability. JEL classification: D31, D63, I31.

This paper investigates immigrant assortative mating and relationship satisfaction. Using a modifi ed random eff ects ordered probit model, the paper demonstrates that spouses of mixed couples are signifi cantly less satisfi ed with their partner than nativeonly and foreign-only couples. JEL Classifi cation: F22, I31