This article aims to analyse the reasons for the intensive use of child labour in the 19th century and its subsequent decline in the first third of the 20th century in the context of an economy with a highly flexible labour supply like that of Catalonia. During the second half of the 19th...

This paper studies the effect of parental education on the educational attainment of children in the US for cohorts born after 1910. Importantly, we allow for cohort-specific differences by gender. Our estimates show that paternal education has been more important for the attainment of male...

Through an experiment, we investigate how the level of rationality relates to concerns for equality and efficiency. Subjects perform dictator games and a guessing game. More rational subjects are not more frequently of the selfregarding type. When performing a comparison within the same degree...

Whereas much literature exists on “choice overload,” little is known about effects of numbers of alternatives in donation decisions. How do these affect both the size and distribution of donations? We hypothesize that donations are affected by the reputation of recipients and increase with...

Some current utility models presume that people are concerned with their relative standing in a reference group. If this is true, do certain types care more about this than others? Using simple binary decisions and self-reported happiness, we investigate both the prevalence of ``difference...

In this paper we address the importance of distributive effects in the social valuation of QALY's. We propose a social welfare function that generalises the functions traditionally used in the health economic literature. The novelty is that, depending on the individual health gains, our function...

This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition of health inequality can be extended to incorporate heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the GHQ measure of psychological...

Climate science indicates that climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare or utility index emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We construct and calibrate a multigenerational model with intertemporal links...

This paper presents a method for the measurement of changes in health inequality and income-related health inequality over time in a population. For pure health inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) and income-related health inequality (as measured by the concentration index), we show...

In cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) it is usually assumed that a QALY is of equal value to everybody, irrespective of the patient's age. However, it is possible that society assigns different social values to a QALY according to who gets it. In this paper we discuss the possibility of weighting...