This paper explores the determinants of individual well-being as measured by self-reported levels of satisfaction with income. Making full use of the panel data nature of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for well-being depending on absolute and on relative levels of...

The social norm of unemployment suggests that aggregate unemployment reduces the well-being of the employed, but has a far smaller effect on the unemployed. We use German panel data to reproduce this standard result, but then suggest that the appropriate distinction may not be between employment...

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in the last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his...

This paper presents a model of legal migration from one source country to two host countries, both of which can control their levels of immigration. Because of complementarities between capital and labor, the return on capital is positively related to the level of immigration. Consequently, when...

This paper examines how the effort choices of workers within the same firm interact with each other. In contrast to the existing literature, we show that workers can affect the productivity of their co-workers based on income maximization considerations, rather than relying on behavioral...

Inhabitants of houses near Amsterdam Airport are complaining of noise nuisance, caused by aircraft traffic. The usual assumption is that the effect of the externality will be perfectly reflected by house price differentials. This is based on the implicit assumption that there is a...