This paper presents the finding of the qualitative survey commissioned by the Department of Transport to understand the effect of poor transport on the lives of the socially marginalised. To a great extent there is not enough knowledge about how and why people are excluded. The aim of this research is to identify the transport and accessibility concerns of people living on low incomes and at th...

Subjective Well-Being and Relative Deprivation: An Empirical Link This paper explores the relationship between two well-established concepts of measuring individual well-being: the concept of happiness, i.e. self-reported level of satisfaction with income and life, and relative deprivation/satisfaction, i.e. the gaps between the individual's income and the incomes of all individuals richer/poor...

Population growth in rural areas characterized by high levels of natural amenities has recently received substantial research attention. A noted concern with amenity-driven rural population growth is its potential to raise local costs-of-living while yielding only low-wage service sector employment for long-term residents. The work presented here empirically models long-term rural residents' ec...

Being higher on the socio-economic scale is correlated with being in better health, but is there is a causal relationship? Using 3 years of longitudinal data for individuals aged 50 and older from the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, we study the health transitions for those who were in good health in the first year, focusing especially on income and education. The initial good he...

Nearly 9 million Americans live in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, places that also tend to be racially segregated and dangerous. Yet, the effects on the well-being of residents of moving out of such communities into less distressed areas remain uncertain. Using data from Moving to Opportunity, a unique randomized housing mobility experiment, we found that moving from a high-poverty to lower-pov...

nowadays the phrase “social capital” has become one of the widely used general terms in social studies. the impact of social capital on economies and politics has expanded and has opened new venues for solving social and political malaise. one of the effects of social capital is its impact on personal welfare. in this article we have used a dynamic model containing two equations to study the im...

This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax effect on subjective well-being is significant and positive when controlling for income net of taxes. T...

Critics charged that the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program trapped people in a cycle of dependency. Some emphasized that the generosity of welfare payments (relative to available employment) made long-term welfare receipt an attractive alternative to work. Others argued that even when employment increased gross income, the total economic package offered by the welfare syste...

Internation comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed-price indexes of real income, such as those in the Penn World Table, substantially understate the in...