Improving biological sustainability through health and wellness improvements in the built environment is currently being applied to high-end real estate development in both the residential and commercial environment in the United States. However, the market for health and wellness extends well beyond the top income bracket. This study adopts a choice experiment (CE) approach to investigate indi...

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broader range of questions than in previous studies. In questions inserted into a 2008 module of the German-Socio Economic Panel Study we ask subjects to report (a) how their income ...

This paper develops ordinal methods to test for changes in the relative academic performance of youth from high-income and low-income households. Applied to the NLSY79 and NLSY97 surveys, these ordinal methods show that the difference in academic achievement between youth from high and low-income households narrowed substantially between 1980 and 1997. In contrast, methods relying on the cardin...

It is widely believed that inflation is harmful to the elderly. Two frequent arguments in support of this belief are that some important income sources for the elderly are less than fully indexed to inflation and that the elderly spend heavily on goods and services whose prices rise faster than the average inflation rate. This article focuses on both the income issue and the expenditure issue. ...

This paper asks how much we should care about changes in Lorenz curves and standard inequality measures when economic growth takes place. I conclude that these changes are of some importance but that other aspects of inequality and poverty are more important. Introduction In December, 2006, the new President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, convened a workshop on economic inequality. Chile has achi...

Research on social class and generosity suggests that higher-income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals. We propose that this pattern emerges only under conditions of high economic inequality, contexts that can foster a sense of entitlement among higher-income individuals that, in turn, reduces their generosity. Analyzing results of a unique nationally representative survey th...

This study considers how the views of the public at large may be used to define the poverty income level. The basic data for the study come from routine Gallup surveys conducted since the beginning of the post-World War II period that asked representative samples of adults in the United States to estimate the smallest amount of money that a family of four needs to "get along." Additional Gallup...

This paper considers the effects of changes in the income distribution in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. We introduce a new methodology to compare the behavior of agents that occupy the same rank in the two different income distributions but typically have different levels of incomes, and an...

Doctors are involved in voluntary service more commonly than both the community and our professional colleagues realise. Traditionally, doctors are seen as busy healers who never stop looking after the sick and/or making a fortune from their daily activities. On the other hand, many in society think doctors are typically earning such high incomes that they can readily afford to volunteer their ...

In a sample of Tanzanian formal sector workers the vast majority have a desire for working longer hours in their main job, and supplement earnings through participation in informal production. Determinants of participation in informal production are examined through estimation of structural-form Logit models. A new way around the problem of measuring incomes from informal production is suggeste...