Prior to around 2011, there was a pronounced curvilinear relationship between age and wellbeing: poor mental health was hump-shaped with respect to age, whilst subjective well-being was U-shaped. We examine data from a European panel for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden called,...

Covering the full population of applicants to the Jamaican Conditional Cash Transfer Program (PATH), we explore whether receiving PATH since childhood altered the academic gains from attending a more preferred public secondary school. To uncover causal associations, we implement a double...

The socio-economic inequality that has been growing for some time now is poison for social cohesion and representative democracy. In order to break through the indifference that still prevails towards socio-economic inequality and make more equality possible, people must become aware that the...

Living standards in old age are affected both by the pension system and the tax system. Yet, little research analyses the interaction between both systems. In this paper, we connect the principles of the pension system (solidarity vs. insurance) to the principles of the tax system (vertical...

Proponents of a basic income (BI) claim that it could bring significant reductions in financial poverty, on top of many other benefits, including greatly reduced administrative complexity and cost. Using microsimulation analysis in a comparative two-country setting, we show that the potential...

Existing well-being measurement initiatives in the region, such as the Quality of Life Indicators in Korea, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index and Quality of Life Index in the Philippines, shed some insight on dimensions that should be considered for measuring well-being beyond GDP in...

Thanks to the large investment of official data producers in OECD countries, measures of subjective well-being have become increasingly robust and meaningful from a policy perspective. In the ten years since the OECD published its Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being, the inclusion of...

We study two early childhood programs in The Gambia for children between 0 and 3 years of age. The basic version of the program, called Baby Friendly Community Initiative (BFCI), provides parents with child health and nutrition information delivered through home visits and community meetings. A...

We investigate the properties of health insurance demand in Burkina Faso, where we offered poor households a voluntary health insurance product at half the usual price. The targeting procedure we implemented delivers a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, which identifies the price elasticity...

This paper analyses the effectiveness of tax-benefit systems in reducing poverty and inequality across 13 countries in the Global South. Using national survey data and tax-benefit microsimulation models from the SOUTHMOD project, we provide a cross-country perspective on the redistributive...