Job-satisfaction as a component of workers' utility has been strangely neglected, with work usually regarded as reducing utility and the benefits of leisure. This is contradicted by many empirical studies showing that unemployment is a major cause of unhappiness, even when income is controlled...

This paper analyzes the intra-household distribution of wealth and welfare in the United States, within a theoretical framework based on a collective model of labor supply, where household decisions are Pareto efficient, and spouses negotiate a sharing rule for non-labor income. Using the...

We study paternalistic preferences in two large-scale experiments with participants from the general population in the United States. Spectators decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, who is mistaken about the choice set, from making a choice that is not aligned with the...

This paper develops a dynamic life-cycle equilibrium model of crime with hetero-geneous agents and human capital accumulation. Agents decide at each point in time whether to commit crimes by comparing potential gains from crime to the expected cost of punishment (determined from the probability...

Utilitarianism is the most prominent family of social welfare functions. We present three new axiomatic characterizations of utilitarian (that is, additively separable) social welfare functions in a setting where there is risk over both population size and the welfares of individuals. First, we...

Few skilled workers in the UK have flexible working time - GPs are the exception - most can only choose between unemployment, or full-time work, which has changed little in recent years, while part time work is mainly unskilled. This market rigidity imposes major welfare losses, in contrast to...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...