The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microfinance programs. It utilises a new, large and unique panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers. We employ different estimation strategies including trip...

Why Does Unemployment Hurt the Employed? Evidence from the Life Satisfaction Gap between the Public and the Private Sector * High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular job security, in workers’ well-being by exploiting sector-specific ins...

How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple’s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behavior that permits identificati...

This paper concentrates on the complex interplay between poverty, wealth and life satisfaction. Main areas of life are quantified in a multidimensional approach of poverty and wealth: Individual income, current health, occupational autonomy or employment status and life satisfaction. The analyzed data was taken from the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) at the German Institute for Econom...

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...