The collection of chapters in the Handbook of Population and Family Economics and their organization reflect the most recent developments in economics pertaining to population issues and the family. The rationale, contents, and organization of the Handbook evolve from three premises. First, the...

The collection of chapters in the Handbook of Population and Family Economics and their organization reflect the most recent developments in economics pertaining to population issues and the family. The rationale, contents, and organization of the Handbook evolve from three premises. First, the...

The social stress experienced by an individual from having a low relative income or from having a low income-based rank is a derivative of the individual's location in social space, and is the outcome of unfavorable comparisons with other individuals in that space. (The term social space stands...

A perception at the core of studies that consider the link between social rank and stress (typically measured by the so-called stress hormone cortisol) is that the link is direct. Examples of such studies are Bartolomucci (2007), Beery and Kaufer (2015), and Koolhaas et al. (2017). A recent and...

The merger of populations expands the comparison space of incomes. As a result, measures of the income-based social stress and of the income inequality of the constituent populations need to be replaced by new measures. To this end, we develop a procedure for calculating the aggregate social...