This paper develops a model of voluntary migration into degrading work. The essence of the model is a tension between two bads that which arises from being relatively deprived at home, and that which arises from engaging in humiliating work away from home. Balancing between these two bads can...

Temporary and part-time workers constitute an important and increasing segment of the workforce in the United States. In this theoretical paper, we examine the impact of IT-induced employment irregularities and deskilling on physical and mental health and economic well-being of such workers. We...

This paper analyses several dimensions of workers' safety that are relevant in the context of a pandemic. We provide a classification of occupations according to the risk of contagion: by considering a wider range of job characteristics and a more nuanced assessment of infection risk, we expand...

Workers value job security. If at least some workers value it enough, then it is efficient for at least some firms to adopt policies in which they commit (implicitly or explicitly) not to dismiss employees except for “just-cause,” as opposed to policies in which employers are free to dismiss...

Why do people acquire consumer debt? In this article, I draw on the case of Chile and call into question the explanatory power of both the "trickle-down" and "privatized Keynesianism" hypotheses. I argue that these narratives fail to explain why, in the context of wage improvements, consumers...

This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain background context effects, individual income satisfaction versus aggregate...

This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

Let a society's unhappiness be measured by the aggregate of the levels of relative deprivation of its members. When two societies of equal size, F and M, merge, unhappiness in the merged society is shown to be higher than the sum of the levels of unhappiness in the constituent societies when...

Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain background context effects, individual income satisfaction versus aggregate...