Drawing on the premise that the integration of economies revises people's social space and their comparators, we quantify social stress by aggregate relative deprivation, ARD; we calculate the effect of monetary mergers on ARD; and we document the validity of the superadditivity property of ARD...

When individuals' utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the maximization of aggregate utility yields an equal income distribution. This...

Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A "culture of unemployment" may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his main reference group. We advance the idea that by making the receipt of...

We relate an observed difference between single men (SM) and single women (SW) in attitudes towards risk to the higher value assigned to social status by SM than by SW. In the marriage market, low status carries a harsher penalty for SM than for SW because when selecting a partner, the social...

We present and test the idea that bequest planning is linked with the experience of inheriting. We consider "a family tradition of bequeathing" as a channel through which the intention to bequeath is moulded by and is positively correlated with the experience of inheriting. Using data from the...

We draw a distinction between the social integration and economic assimilation of migrants, and study an interaction between the two. We define social integration as blending into the host country’s society, and economic assimilation as acquisition of human capital that is specific to the host...

This paper considers the integration of economies as a merger of populations. The premise is that the merger of groups of people alters their social landscape and their comparators. The paper identifies the effect of the merger on aggregate distress. A merger is shown to increase aggregate...

In the model of Stark et al. (1997, 1998), the possibility of employment in a developed country raises the level of human capital acquired by workers in the developing country. We show that this result holds even when workers have the option to save. -- Human capital formation ; Savings ;...

Recent research shows that the merger of economies increases aggregate stress. This paper shows that there is no income distribution policy which will ensure that the wellbeing of the individuals belonging to merging economies does not fall below their pre-merger level.

We introduce a new class of generalized measures of relative deprivation. The class takes the form of a power mean of order p . A characteristic of the class is that depending on the value of the proximity-sensitive parameter p , the class is capable of accommodating both a decreasing weight...