This paper explores the power of personality traits both as predictors and as causes of academic and economic success, health, and criminal activity. Measured personality is interpreted as a construct derived from an economic model of preferences, constraints, and information. Evidence is...

This paper examines the influence of parental wealth and income on children's college attendance and parental financing decisions, graduation, and quality of college attended, and whether parental financing affects the subsequent indebtedness of parents and children. We find that higher levels...

The paper investigates the definition of equity-regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population. It derives the implications of a between-type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures, for the choice of poverty lines and for the measurement of...

Most methods for the analysis of distributional change rely on the changes in the income of a particular group of people, taking either the situation of this group in the previous period, or the average change in the population, as reference point. By contrast, we propose a measure of...

We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer...

Poverty measures in developing countries often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption. In this paper, we extend the collective model of household consumption to recover mother's, father's and children's shares together with economies of scale,...

The question of whether there is a connection between income and psychological well-being is a long-studied issue across the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences. Much research has found that richer people tend to be happier. However, relatively little attention has been paid to...

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...

We use data from two rounds of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to study the determinants of subjective well-being in China over the period 2005-2010 during which self-reported happiness scores show an increase across all income groups. Ordered probit regression analysis of well-being...

Using representative and consistent microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 1985-2007, we illustrate that capital income (CI = return on financial investments) and imputed rent (IR = return on investments in owner-occupied housing) have become increasingly important...