This paper provides an analytical framework to capture the economic importance of social capital for growth and innovation. Relational Capital (RC) consists of contacts between economic necessary to acquire inputs and to sell outputs units. These contacts form the individual aspect of social...

Survey-based health research is in a boom phase following an increased amount of health spending in OECD countries and the interest in ageing. A general characteristic of survey-based health research is its diversity. Different studies are based on different health questions in different...

Psychologists and sociologists usually interpret happiness scores as cardinal and comparable across respondents, and thus run OLS regressions on happiness and changes in happiness. Economists usually assume only ordinality and have mainly used ordered latent response models, thereby not taking...

In this paper, we seek to explain the changes in aggregate happiness over the lifecycle. The advantage of looking at the aggregate level of happiness is that it solves the problems of missing peer effects and measurement error that plague models of individual level happiness, though the...

Australian happiness levels are known to decline between the age of 15 and 23 by almost 0.7 on a ten-point scale. To find out what happens before that age, we develop child-specific scales to measure the effect of personality and life satisfaction domains on childhood happiness. With an...

Sacrifices to deities occur in nearly all known religions. In this paper, we report on our attempts to elicit this type of religious behaviour towards "Theoi" in the laboratory. The theory we test is that, when faced with uncertainty, individuals attempt to engage in a reciprocal contract with...

We examine the nature of stated subjective probabilities in a complex, evolving context in which true event probabilities are not within subjects' explicit information set. Specically, we collect information on subjective expectations in a car race wherein participants must bet on a particular...

The literature has shown strong associations between health, financial and social life events and mental health. However, no studies as yet have looked at the temporal nature of the effects of life events on stated mental health nor have they included the effects of the events befalling partners...

We employ a natural field experiment to study the extent and nature of racial discrimination in Queensland, Australia. Mimicking the historical case of Rosa Parks who was denied seating in a bus because she was black, an important moment for the U.S. civil rights movement, we sent trained...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. If there are labor market frictions, this additional option can be seen as reducing the chances of ending up in a low-wage job and hence as increasing the incentives for education. In a matching model,...