Medical care at the end of life, estimated to contribute up to a quarter of US health care spending, often encounters skepticism from payers and policy makers who question its high cost and often minimal health benefits. It seems generally agreed upon that medical resources are being wasted on...

A diverse array of factors may influence both earnings and consumption; however, this work primarily focuses on the impact of investments in human capital upon an individual's potential earnings and psychic income. For this study, investments in human capital include such factors as educational...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze systematically the production of effort and its allocation among different market and non-market sectors. I believe that this analysis can explain much of the variation in earnings that is not explained by human capital. The first section introduces the...

This comment discusses the importance of politics in understanding cost-benefit analysis. Economists frequently rely on a social planner model, under which cost-benefit analysis has a straightforward role. However, a better model for understanding actual political choices of policies and...

We model happiness as a measurement tool used to rank alternative actions. Evolution favors a happiness function that measures the individual's success in relative terms. The optimal function is based on a time-varying reference point - or performance benchmark - that is updated over time in a...