This paper examines a famous puzzle in social science. Why do some nations report such high happiness? Denmark, for instance, regularly tops the league table of rich nations' well-being; Great Britain and the US enter further down; France and Italy do relatively poorly. Yet the explanation for...

We evaluate a comprehensive activation program in Norway targeted at hard-to-employ social assistance claimants with reduced work capacity. The program offers a combination of tailored rehabilitation, training and job practice, and a generous, stable, and non-means-tested benefit. Its main aims...

We study how international migration changes the private transfers made between households in the migrant sending communities of developing countries. A priori, it is indeterminate whether migration and remittances strengthen or weaken the degree of private transfers in these communities. From a...

We discuss and compare five measures of individual well-being, namely income, an objective composite well-being index, a measure of subjective well-being, equivalent income, and a well-being measure based on the von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the individuals. After examining the...

This paper revisits the debate over the importance of absolute vs. relative income as a correlate of subjective well-being using data from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world with high levels of corruption and poor governance. We do so by combining household data with...

The extent to which socioeconomic (dis)advantage is transmitted between generations is receiving increasing attention from academics and policymakers. However, few studies have investigated whether there is a spatial dimension to this intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage. Drawing...

Studies of neighbourhood effects typically investigate the instantaneous effect of point-in-time measures of neighbourhood poverty on individual outcomes. It has been suggested that it is not solely the current neighbourhood, but also the neighbourhood history of an individual that is important...

The literature on neighbourhood effects suggests that the lack of social mobility of some groups has a spatial dimension. It is thought that those living in the most deprived neighbourhoods are the least likely to achieve upward mobility because of a range of negative neighbourhood effects. Most...

This paper studies the impact of permanent and transitory shocks to income on parental investments in children. We use panel data on family income, and an index of investments in children in time and goods, from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Consistent with the...