There is a strong suggestion from the existing literature that volunteering improves the wellbeing of those who give up their time to help others, but much of it is correlational and not causal. In this paper, we estimate the wellbeing benefits from volunteering for England's National Health...

There is a strong suggestion from the existing literature that volunteering improves the wellbeing of those who give up their time to help others, but much of it is correlational and not causal. In this paper, we estimate the wellbeing benefits from volunteering for England's National Health...

A social time preference methodology derived from Feldstein (1965) is applied to calculate social discount rates across 167 countries and across time from 2005-2050 for a country case (Brazil). This attempt seeks to compute comparable figures from a homogeneous dataset and provides a...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Sen's capability approach has a culturally specific side, with capabilities influenced by social structures and institutions. Although Sen acknowledges this, he expresses his theory in individualistic terms and makes little allowance for culture or social structure. The present paper draws from...

Conventional economic modelling of social welfare predicts that welfare payments will have unequivocal negative effects upon the economy in terms of labor supply, production costs, and employment. However, the conventional model is built upon assumptions that are too restrictive given the...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where robots can be substituted for unskilled labor and the government uses the tax revenues for social capital investment and compensation of those who do not work. As the main novelty of the paper, we consider that social capital augments the...

Since the start of the century, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced large gains in life expectancy and average consumption levels. Around the same time, an unprecedented international effort has taken place to combat HIV/AIDS mortality with the expansion of anti-retroviral...

In this paper we try to understand how the Happiness Literature (HL) approach to Welfare Economics (WE) enriches it by enlarging its scope and power of analysis. To do so, we contrast the HL approach not only with Mainstream Welfare Economics (MWE) but also with the already established Sen’s...

The concern for measuring well-being objectively (as opposed to subjectively, that is, relying only on preferences) is found in modern political philosophy, especially in J. Rawls's, A. Sen's and G. Cohen's thoughts. This paper explains the implications of using an objective well-being index as...