This paper examines the sensitivity of inequality and poverty measures to the adult equivalence scale and the unit of analysis. Comparisons are made using parametric equivalence scales, and income units include individuals, equivalent adults and households. The role of the correlation between equivalent income and household size, and the weight attached to children, is examined analytically. Em...

This paper argues that life satisfaction data can be used to value natural disasters. We discuss the strengths of this approach, compare it to traditional methods and apply it to estimate and monetize utility losses caused by floods in 17 OECD countries between 1973 and 2004. Using combined cross-section and time-series data, we find a negative impact of floods on life satisfaction that is size...

Standard poverty analysis makes statements about deprivation after the veil of uncertainty has been lifted. Nonetheless, the term 'vulnerability' has been used as a tool to remark that uncertainty and risk do matter. In this paper, we define 'vulnerability to poverty' as the magnitude of the threat of poverty, measured exante, before uncertainty is resolved. We describe the desirable properties...

What Buys Happiness? Analyzing Trends in Subjective Well-Being in 15 European Countries, 1973-2002 Trends in life satisfaction are examined across 15 European countries employing a modified version of Kendall’s Tau. Analyses show that GDP growth relative to growth in the preceding period is a significant determinant of the trends; the same holds for the growth in life expectancy while the conte...

human capital has important role on economic growth. this factor can increase labor and capital productivity. it can increase capacity of new technology and reduce criminal participation and improve voters’ political behavior and migration of people with high human capital to another region has effects on region and spatial spillover on other regions. the present study aimed to analyze the dire...

The Measurement of Child Costs: Evidence from Ireland We apply an extension of the Rothbarth approach to estimate the share of household resources accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children) in Ireland. The method also allows us to identify the economies of scale in the household and indifference scales in Lewbel (2003)’s sense. A practical aspect of the present approach is that it does n...

Concerns for environmental quality and its impact on people’s welfare are fundamental arguments for the adoption of environmental legislation in most countries. In this paper, we analyse the relationship between air quality and subjective well-being in Europe. We use a unique dataset that merges three waves of the European Social Survey with a new dataset on environmental quality including SO2 ...

This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengths of this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues are addressed. Moreover, it is applied to panel data to estimate utilit...

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. This paper argues that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and endeavors to provide an impression of this new, and challenging, development. We study data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to better understand (i) t...

In important situations, individual decision-making is systematically biased. When deciding (rather than consuming), extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. People overestimate extrinsic attributes and therefore put too much effort into acquiring income and gaining status, lowering their utility level. These mistakes are accentuated in authoritarian sy...