We test for whether, once "basic needs" are satisfied, there is happiness adaptation to further gains in income using three data sets. Individual German Panel Data from 1985-2000, and data on the well-being of over 600,000 people in a panel of European countries from 1975-2002, shows different...

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This paper evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that...

There are a large number of cases where corruption has been discovered investigating levels of consumption that appear to be hard to justify. Yet, in the standard moral hazard model withholding of effort by the agent is not observable to the principal. We argue that this assumption has to be...

We study quot;habituationquot; to income and to status using individual panel data on the happiness of 7,812 people living in Germany from 1984 to 2000. Specifically, we estimate a quot;happiness equationquot; defined over several lags of income and status and compare the long run effects. We...

This paper develops a method of estimating the coefficient of relative risk aversion (g) from data on labor supply. The main result is that existing estimates of labor supply elasticities place a tight bound on g, without any assumptions beyond those of expected utility theory. It is shown that...

This paper examines the welfare consequences of social safety nets in developing economies relative to developed economies. Using panel surveys of households in Indonesia and the United States, we find that food consumption falls by approximately ten percent when individuals become unemployed in...

We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. We document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility...

This paper shows that existing evidence on labor supply behavior places an upper bound on risk aversion in the expected utility model. I derive a formula for the coefficient of relative risk aversion (g) in terms of (1) the ratio of the income elasticity of labor supply to the wage elasticity...

We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional...