The transition from more traditional to modern modes of production has large implications for time allocation, accumulation of social capital, market and non-market production, consumption, as well as for the environmental externalities of production and consumption. In this paper we explicitly...

Hirsch (1976) suggested that as consumption grows, an increasing proportion of the benefits people derive from consumption is due to a status effect. Status is a relative concept that cannot be increased on average; thus it may seem reasonable to expect that as consumption grows, the marginal...

There is no consensus on how to measure interpersonally comparable, cardinal utility. Despite of this, people repeatedly make welfare evaluations in their everyday lives. However, people do not always agree on such evaluations, and this is one important reason for political disagreements. Thus,...

Corporate social responsibility can improve firms' ability to recruit highly motivated employees. This can secure socially responsible firms' survival even in a highly competitive environment. We show that if both socially responsible (green) and non-responsible (brown) firms exist in...

The question of whether changes in net national product (NNP) will measure changes in welfare is investigated in this paper. M. Weitzman (1976) demonstrated that, under specific conditions, NNP is proportional to discounted consumption. The result requires NNP to be measured in current prices in...

A growing body of empirical studies have reported that social inequalities in health are as large (or even larger) in the Nordic welfare states than in many less egalitarian societies. This is highly surprising since the welfare state is rooted in income equality, free access to education and...