The paper provides estimates of the effect of economic inequality on middle class well being in Switzerland. Economic well being is proxied by a person’s satisfaction with his/her income. Two inequality indicators are used, one standard (the Gini coefficient of the pre-tax income distribution) and one novel (the number of luxury car registrations per 1000 population). Identification is through ...

We introduce social capital accumulation into a neoclassical model, showing how it differs from physical and human capital accumulation. We take the view that social capital is crucial to the enjoyment of socially provided goods and that it is mainly accumulated by means of participation to social activities. Under-investment in social capital may lead a growing economy to fall into a social po...

Forecasting with Spatial Panel Data This paper compares various forecasts using panel data with spatial error correlation. The true data generating process is assumed to be a simple error component regression model with spatial remainder disturbances of the autoregressive or moving average type. The best linear unbiased predictor is compared with other forecasts ignoring spatial correlation, or...

in this paper, economic convergence in selected oic (36 countries) is studied. the convergence hypothesis is tested through three approaches: beta convergence, sigma convergence, and time series model. ols is used for estimating the cross section model and cross variance is used to test the distributive model. for analyzing time series model, we used augmented dicky fuller test. beta convergenc...

Recent evidence suggests that many economic time series are subject to structural breaks, yet little is known about the properties of alternative forecasting methods for such data. This paper proposes a new method for determining the window size that explores the trade-off between bias and forecast error variance to minimize the mean squared forecast error in the presence of breaks in autoregre...

abstract t his paper explains bilateral trade patterns between south korea and thirteen opec member countries over the period 1980-2014 using a gravity model. the estimation results show that the gravity equation fits the data reasonably well. we confirmed the existence of long term relationships between the bilateral trade flows and the main components of gravity model - gdp, income (gdp per c...

Money doesn’t seem to make us happy for reasons of social comparison and habituation. But does that necessarily mean that we would be better off doing something else instead? This paper suggests that the phenomena of comparison and habituation are actually found in a variety of economic and social activities, rendering policy conclusions more difficult. JEL Classification Codes: D01, D31, H00, ...

Based on Lewbel, Chiappori and Browning (2002), this paper summarizes how the use of collective models of household behavior can overcome the identiÞcation problems associated with the construction and estimation of adult equivalence scales. JEL codes: K1, D1, J17, C30, I31.

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under utilitarianism is equality of incomes. JEL classification: H0, I0, I30, I31

We characterize a family of r-extended generalized Lorenz dominance quasi-orderings and a family of r-Gini welfare orderings, on the basis of two allegedly “incompatible” axioms for heterogeneous welfare comparisons (Ebert, 1997, Ebert and Moyes, 2003, Shorrocks, 1995), but at the cost of either completeness or separability. JEL classification: D31, D63, I31.