During the last 30 years US citizens experienced, on average, a decline in reported happiness, social connections, and confidence in institutions. We show that a remarkable portion of the decrease in happiness is predicted by the decline in social connections and confidence in institutions. We...

The recent debate on happiness in economics has revived interest in Scitovsky's 1976 book The Joyless Economy, which aims at extending the concept of welfare, and explaining the income-happiness paradox, i.e. “why [American] unprecedented and fast-growing prosperity had left its beneficiaries...

This book is a welcome consolidation and extension of the recent expanding debates on happiness and economics. Happiness and economics, as a new field for research, is now of pivotal interest particularly to welfare economists and psychologists. This Handbook provides an unprecedented forum for...

A matching model will explain both unemployment and economic growth by considering the underground sector and human capital. Three problems can thus be simultaneously accounted for: (i) the persistence of the underground sector, (ii) the ambiguous relationships between underground employment and...

The recent debate on happiness in economics has revived interest in Scitovsky’s 1976 book The Joyless Economy, which aims at explaining the income-happiness paradox, i.e. "why [American] unprecedented and fast-growing prosperity had left its beneficiaries unsatisfied." A dynamic economic model...

The paper investigates the relation between social capital and life satisfaction focusing on the distinction between bonding and bridging as introduced by Putnam (2000). Using the latest version of the combined World and European Values Surveys, we first address the question of measurement of...

This paper incorporates tax morale into a search and matching model of equilibrium unemployment, with on-the-job search, extended to both the irregular sector and entrepreneurship. Tax morale is modelled as a social norm for tax compliance which renders evasion costly. The moral cost of tax...

This paper develops a labour market matching model in order to address the problem of the persistence of the hidden sector and of its regional concentration, as in Italy and in the enlarged Europe. The main novel features of the model are that entrepreneurial ability affects job productivity,...

Scitovsky laid the foundations for a new theory of people’s well-being in his 1976 book The Joyless Economy. This paper, after a reconstruction of Scitovsky’s analysis throughout the book and his related writings, shows that supporting evidence can be found in recent economic and psychology...