In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

We look at the effect of importance of religion in daily life on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. We make use of new data from the Gallup World Poll for 109 countries and 43 U.S. states. Our empirical results indicate a robust,...

We argue that perceived fairness of the income generation process affects the association between income inequality and subjective well-being, and that there are systematic differences in this regard between countries that are characterized by a high or, respectively, low level of actual...

A series of studies connect social trust to economic growth. In this paper, we explore the connection between trust and a broader measure of development, the UN Human Development Index. We find that trust is significantly associated with faster human development in the 1980–2005 period. The...

This article connects two strands of the literature on social trust by directly estimating the effects of trust on growth through a set of potential transmission mechanisms. It does so by modeling the process using a 3SLS estimator on a sample of 85 countries for which a full data set is...

In the paper, we argue that trust is the missing link relating education, institutions, and economic development. We argue that increased trust both increases education and improves legal and bureaucratic institutions, which in turn spurs economic development. We substantiate this intuition with...

While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...

We argue that perceived fairness of the income generation process affects the association between income inequality and subjective well-being, and that there are systematic differences in this regard between countries that are characterized by a high or, respectively, low level of actual...