Temporary help services (THS) firms are increasing their hiring of disadvantaged individuals while also increasing their use of employment subsidies for doing so. Do these subsidies—the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) and Welfare-to-Work Tax Credit (WtW)—create incentives that improve...

A modern statistical literature argues that countries such as Denmark are particularly happy while nations like East Germany are not. Are such claims credible? The paper explores this by building on two ideas. The first is that psychological well-being and high blood-pressure are thought by...

This paper proposes a new way to think about happiness. It distinguishes between stocks and flows. Central to the analysis is a concept we call ‘hedonic capital’. The paper sets out a model of the dynamics of wellbeing in which bad life-shocks are smoothed by the drawing down of hedonic...

This paper examines the economic impact of the second great immigration wave (1945- 2000) on the US economy. Contrary to recent studies, we estimate that immigration induced important net gains and small redistributive effects among natives. Our analysis relies on a computable general...

While rising unemployment generally reduces people’s happiness, researchers argue that there is a compensating social-norm effect for the unemployed individual, who might suffer less when it is more common to be unemployed. This empirical study, however, rejects this thesis for German panel...

En el presente documento se hace un análisis descriptivo de la pobreza urbana en Cartagena. El tema se aborda desde dos perspectivas. En la primera, se analiza la pobreza desagregada por los barrios que conforman la cabecera municipal de Cartagena. En la segunda, se realiza una comparación de...

Financial crisis has connected Europe with an obvious common pattern which consists the rapidly rise of protest parties that challenge the established political systems. The basic and new feature of these schemes is the intense war rhetoric against the European Union and the vehement rejection...

The United States government devotes about $40 billion each year to means-tested housing programs, plus another $6 billion or so in tax expenditures on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). What exactly do we spend this money on, why, and what does it accomplish? We focus on these...

This document presents a quasi-experimental impact evaluation of Renta Dignidad, a universal non-contributory pension to old-age population in Bolivia, on intended and unintended outcomes including: household’s welfare, investments and savings, and labor market outcomes of direct and indirect...

Running since 1997 and continuing today, the Townsend Thai Project has tracked millions of observations about the economic activities of households and institutions in rural and urban Thailand. The project represents one of the most extensive datasets in the developing world. Chronicles from the...