Aiming to further explore possible underlying causes for the recent stagnation in American heights, this paper describes the result of analysis of the commercial U.S. Sizing Survey. Using zip codes available in the data set, we consider geographic correlates of height such as local poverty rate,...

Within the course of the 20th century the American population went through a metamorphosis from being the tallest in the world, to being among the most overweight. The American height advantage over Western and Northern Europeans was between 3 and 9 cm in the middle of the 19th century....

This paper analyzes the e ffect of regional income inequality within countries on individual life satisfaction. We use data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Survey (EVS) containing approximately 97,000 observations from 1981-2008. Regional income inequality is measured...

This paper analyzes a general-equilibrium model in which each person can choose to be either a producer or a predator. This model shows how predation breaks the link between the interpersonal distribution of productive resources and the interpersonal distribution of consumption. Specifically, we...

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile...

Can a bank increase its profit by subsidizing inactivity? This paper suggests this may occur, due to the presence of hidden information, in a monopolistic credit market. Rather than offering credit in a pooling contract, a monopolist bank can sort borrowers through an appropriate subsidy to...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on subjective well-being it is possible...

In the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe life satisfaction has followed the V-shaped pattern of GDP but failed to recover commensurately. In general, increased satisfaction with material living levels has occurred at the expense of decreased satisfaction with work,...

Economic disruption in East Germany at the time of unification resulted in a noticeable drop in life satisfaction. By the late 1990s East Germany's life satisfaction had recovered to about its 1990 level, and its shortfall relative to West Germany was slightly less than that before unification....

This paper adds three dimensions to the received literature: it models migration when the individuals' preferences regarding their relative income are ordinal, it works out the resulting spatial steady-state distribution of the individuals, and it shows that the aggregate of the individuals'...