Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

This paper describes procedures for measuring and estimating the fundamental quantities in the study of distributive justice. We examine a variety of methods for measuring the actual reward and the just reward, for both self and other, including direct and indirect methods for measuring the just...

There is a small but growing literature on the determinants of social capital. Most of these studies use a measure of trust to define social capital empirically. In this paper we use three different measures of social capital: the size of the individual's social network, the extent of their...

The goal of scientific work is to understand more and more by less and less. In this effort, theoretical unification plays a large part. There are two main types of theoretical unification - unification of different theories of the same field of phenomena and unification of theories of different...

The empirical literature on the determinants of charities donation income, distinguishing the charitable cause, is small. We extend the literature in several ways. First, we focus on overseas development charities allowing us to give more consideration to the particular characteristics of this...

This chapter defines a universal public pension scheme (UPPS) as a government-mandated lifecycle longevity insurance scheme that transfers individual consumption from the working years to the retirement phase of the lifecycle. It discusses the differences in four UPPS designs defined with regard...

This study measures the extent to which Seoul's COVID-19 shopping coupon program affects individuals' consumption. Unlike other COVID-19-related transfer programs, the Seoul Metropolitan government provides consumption coupons depending on income. We quantify the causal effect of Seoul's program...

When comparing economic well-being using income or expenditures, an equivalence scale is often used to adjust for differences in characteristics that affect needs. For example, a family of two is assumed to need more income than a single person, but not twice as much due to the economies of...