There is an ambiguity in Amartya Sen's capability approach as to what constitutes an individual's resources, conversion factors and valuable functionings. What we here call the "circularity problem" points to the fact that all three concepts seem to be mutually endogenous and interrelated. All...

In the capability literature, studies on the empirical measurement in the functionings space are abundant and a few studies even measure capability to function. We suggest adopting a third measure of welfare relevant to economists, namely the "conversion efficiency" measuring the efficiency with...

This publication concentrates on the complex interplay between poverty, wealth and life satisfaction. Main areas of life are quantified in a multidimensional approach of poverty and wealth: Individual income, current health, occupational autonomy or employment status and also the mentioned life...

We use a panel vector autoregressions model to examine the coevolution of changes in happiness and changes in income, health, marital status as well as employment status for the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set. This technique allows us to simultaneously analyze the impact of the...

Este trabajo tiene por objetivo determinar si existe convergencia en la calidad de vida de las comunas y de los corregimientos del municipio de Medellín para el período 2004-2011. Para tal efecto, se realizaron análisis no paramétricos de estimación de funciones de Kernel estocásticas....

Brazil has more than 23 million rural people with unimproved sanitation, which corresponds to about 75% of rural population. This study aimed to measure the social, environmental and economic impacts caused by implementation of a technological proposal for sanitation: “septic cesspool...

This paper presents the first study of environmental inequality related to health in France at the national scale. Through an econometric analysis based on a panel data from 2000 to 2004 at a department level, we investigate total mortality rate in relation to socioeconomic status and air...

Obesity has become a major health issue. Research in economics has provided important insights as to how technological progress reduced the relative price of food and contributed to the increase in obesity. However, the increased availability of food might well have overstrained will power and...

Using recently released data on public mental health expenditures by U.S. states from 1997 to 2005, this study is the first to examine the effect of state mental health spending on suicide rates. We find the effect of per capita public mental health expenditures on the suicide rate to be...