We introduce a tractable multi-issue model of electoral competition in which candidates are exogenously committed to particular positions on a subset of issues, while they can choose a sequence of binary positions for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. A majorityefficient position is defined as one where a candidate cannot make a majority of the electorate better off, t...

Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) subsidize out-of-pocket health expenses not covered by employerprovided health insurance, making health care cheaper ex post, but also reducing the incentive to insure. We use a cross section of firm-level data to show that FSAs are indeed associated with reduced insurance coverage, and to evaluate the welfare consequences of this shift. Correcting for selectio...

Recent Advances in the Economics of Individual Subjective Well-Being Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulus to the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective wellbeing is often taken as a proxy measure for individual welfare. In our revi...

Sundays Are Blue: Aren’t They? The Day-of-the-Week Effect on Subjective Well-Being and Socio-Economic Status This paper analyses whether individuals are influenced by the day of the week when reporting subjective well-being. By using a large panel data set and controlling for observed and unobserved individual characteristics, we find a large day-of the-week effect. Overall, we find a ‘blue’ Su...

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management. This gives a manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk exposure. The misaligned incentives create potentially significant deviations of the manager’s policy from that desired by fund investors. In the context of a f...

Focusing on the global trading relationship aggregated at the level of 15 regions and 10 sectors, we investigate in this paper the welfare effects of preferential trade liberalisation in South Asia from several simulation perspectives. The static version of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model shows that countries that are initially more protected (such as India) are likely to capture...

This paper discusses how to improve the identification of the preference of a decision maker (DM) with limited attention proposed by Masatlioglu, Nakajima, and Ozbay (2012). Their identification method relies on choice reversals so the obtained revealed preference is often very incomplete. We propose three approaches to address this problem. The first one is accommodating to a model-free approa...

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...