We study the effect of political ideology on sustainable development, measured as investment in genuine wealth, in a dynamic panel of 79 countries between 1981 and 2013. We find that a switch from a left-wing or centrist government to a right-wing government has a robust positive and statistically significant effect on investment in genuine wealth. We find no evidence of opportunistic cycles in...

We propose a spatial quantile autoregression (SQAR) model, which allows cross-sectional dependence among the responses, unknown heteroscedasticity in the disturbances, and heterogeneous impacts of covariates on different points (quantiles) of a response distribution. The instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) method of Chernozhukov and Hansen (2006) is generalized to allow the data to...

How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual’s wage within a comparison group. ‘Rank’ itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, ...

Social Security in Belgium: Distributive Outcomes The paper analyzes the link between old-age income programs and economic outcomes in Belgium. We use a simulation methodology to construct an average pension generosity variable. Our regression analysis explores the link with distributional outcomes in income, consumption and more subjective indicators. Results document the weak link between ave...

The domain of polyconvex sets, i.e. finite unions of convex, compact, Euclidean sets, is large enough to encompass most of the opportunity sets typically encountered in economic environments, including non-linear or even non-convex budget sets, and opportunity sets arising from production sets. We provide a characterization of the volume-ranking as defined on the set of all polyconvex sets, rel...

This paper considers the functioning approach to the standard of living. It shows that, in evaluating standards of living, one is faced with deep-rooted tensions between the principle of minimal relativism, which requires some minimal respect for differences between the evaluations of different individuals and/or the differences between the norms of different communities, and the principle of d...

Much progress has been made in recent years in developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on satisfaction with income and with life in general. In this paper we apply this new type of measurement to the study of money illusion. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 1993 to 2003, we cannot reject the hypothesis of no money illusion. JEL Cla...

We suggest a non-parametric heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) estimator of the variance–covariance (VC) matrix for a vector of sample moments within a spatial context. We demonstrate consistency under a set of assumptions that should be satisfied by a wide class of spatial models. We allow for more than one measure of distance, each of which may be measured with error. Mon...

ABSTRACT We investigate the role of gender on aggressiveness sell-side analysts' questions during earnings conference calls. Our tests reveal that verbal is significantly associated with both analyst asking question and CEO fielding question. First, we find male analysts are more verbally aggressive than female analysts. Specifically, direct likely to be followed further questions, have a prefa...

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 ...