This is a pioneering study of the determinants of the subjective well-being of ethnic minority people in rural China, using a specially designed sample survey relating to 2011.  The underlying hypothesis is that the lifestyle and attitudes of ethnic minorities contribute to their happiness. ...

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early...

A national household survey for 2002, containing a specially designed module on subjective well-being, is used to estimate pioneering happiness functions in rural China. The variables predicted by economic theory to be important for happiness are relatively unimportant. The analysis suggests...

This paper shows how to derive a complete set of optimality conditions characterising the solution to a dynamic optimal income tax problem in the spirit of Mirrlees (1971), under the assumption that a 'first-order' approach to incentive compatibility is valid.  The method relies on constructing...

A well-known time-inconsistency problem hinders optimal decision-making when policymakers are constrained in their pesent choices by expectations of future outcomes.  The time-inconsistency problem is caused by differences in the preferences of policymakers who exist at different points in...

Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employed to encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbon tax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology, yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce...

This paper investigates how best to determine time-invariant policy rules in macroeconomic models with forward-looking constraints, where fully optimal policy is known to be time-inconsistent.  It proposes a new 'coefficient optimisation' approach that improves upon the timeless perspective...

This paper shows that the use of hyperbolic discounting in environmental regulation can have unfortunate consequences. In a three-period model we demonstrate that a planner who `naively` employs hyperbolic discounting and fails to anticipate problems of dynamic inconsistency, can oversee a...

We examine the impact of different degrees of fiscal feedback on debt in an economy with nominal rigidities where monetary policy is optimal. We look at the extent to which different degrees of fiscal feedback enhances or detracts from the ability of the monetary authorities to stabilise output...