This paper raises the issue whether public policy should focus on minimizing unhappiness rather than maximizing happiness. Using a cross-sectional multi-country dataset with 57,000 observations from 29 European countries, we show that unhappiness varies a great deal more across social groups...

Economic transition lowered happiness on average, but did not affect all equally. This paper uses Hungarian survey data to study the impact of religion and economic transition on happiness. Religious involvement contributes positively to individuals' self-reported well-being. Controlling for...

The paper presents evidence on the effects of taxes and benefits on household incomes in Hungary referring to the 2006 system and a hypothetical flat tax reform. For this, a microsimulation model is used, which is based on a matched sample of an income and a consumption survey and administrative...

Even though tax evasion has been the focus of a growing volume of research in recent years, the issue of its distributional impact is still relatively neglected. This paper is an attempt to analyse empirically the implications of tax evasion in terms of inequality, poverty, redistribution and...

The paper argues that there is a cherishable overlap between “objective good” and people’s preferences in measures of well-being. Firstly, using recent survey data from twenty European countries I analyse the determinants of individual’s “experienced utility”. The proxy for utility...