We analyze a society that cares about inequality of opportunity. We propose adynamic setting in which effort is a decision variable that individuals adopt as asolution of an explicit utility maximization program. Effort determines themonetary outcome and it depends on the individual¿s...

This paper investigates the effect of health shocks on household consumption and child nutrition. Using longitudinal data from rural Colombia we find that several items of household consumption, including medical expenditure, food consumption, and total consumption, increase following a recent...

This paper analyses the evaluation of the relative performance of a set of groups when their outcomes are defined in terms of categorical data and the groups’ members are heterogeneous. This type of problem has been dealt with in Herrero and Villar (2012) for the case of a homogenous...

This paper examines the relationships between socioeconomic conditions and happiness or satisfaction of individuals in 15 countries. In agreement with earlier studies, age, health and marital status are strongly associated with happiness and satisfaction. In seeming contrast with other studies,...

The recent recession has generated a tremendous increase in unemployment rates in Spain. In this paper we use a very rich repeated cross-section dataset on workers’ job conditions, together with regional unemployment rates, to investigate whether peers’ unemployment affects individuals’...

Though numerous surveys where people quantify their happiness or satisfaction are available, economic research has not analysed the association between these variables and their socioeconomic characteristics until recent years. By using the 1995 world values survey for Spain, this article aims...

Spatial price dispersion varies because of climatic fluctuations, marketimperfections, economic growth or economic policies. These variations areoften neglected in poverty studies.In this paper, we propose a simple simulation formula to assess the effecton poverty of a change in the spatial mean...

We show under lognormality that, when the Gini coefficient is stable over time, defining the poverty line as a fraction of a central tendency of the living standard distribution restricts the evolution of the poverty measures to be stable. That is, poverty does not change if the Gini coefficient...

This paper questions the empirical evidence of the relationship between inequality and growth on the basis of the estimation of convergence equations. The criticisms are aimed in two directions - at the quality of the data and at the standard estimation procedure. It begins by describing in...