This note is motivated by recent arguments made by Martin Feldstein in which the relevance of inequality is dismissed (if everybody's income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and the argument is made that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care...

This paper contributes to the growing literature on happiness research by examining whether happiness affects the ethical decisions of individuals. First, a recursive model of ethical decision making is developed in which an agent's utility is assumed to be a function of money, ethical...

We examine the characteristics and relative strength of third-party sanctions in a series of experiments. We hypothesize that egalitarian distribution norms and cooperation norms apply in our experiments, and that third parties, whose economic payoff is unaffected by the norm violation, may be...

This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain back-ground context effects,individual income satisfaction versus aggregate...

This paper analyzes the household decision-making process leading to the allocation of time and consumption in the family. We estimate, on the British Household Panel Survey, a collective model of demand for leisure generalized to the production of a household public good. For the first time in...

La limitazione del benessere ai soli aspetti reddituali ignora numerose dimensioni e condizioni fondamentali per il realizzarsi delle potenzialità individuali. Obiettivo dell’articolo è quello di fornire una misura multidimensionale di benessere per le Regioni italiane, che superi la...

Prais (1958) showed that the standard CPI computed by most statistical agencies can be interpreted as a weighted average of household price indexes, where the weight of each household is determined by its total expenditures. In this paper, we analytically decompose the difference between the...

The legal theory of blackmail is the veritable puzzle surrounded by a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Consider. Blackmail consists of two things, each indisputably legal on their own; yet, when combined in a single act, the result is considered a crime. What are the two things? First, there is...