I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004)prediction that individuals'reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference income is not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants'...

Utility-based measures for health-related quality of life gain more and more importance in cost-effectiveness analysis. The axiomatic foundation qualifies them as decision weights in use of the QALY concept. But their use is strained for they are loaded with assumptions to make them work....

Using cross-sectional time series data from a large group of African countries, we examine the effects of income, institutions and social capital—with emphasis on the latter—on literacy and life expectancy. The empirical results confirm that income has a positive contribution. We also show...

We use data on the subjective well-being of more than a quarter of a million people living in the OECD over the period 1975-92 to study the behavior of partisan social happiness functions. Controlling for personal characteristics of the respondents, year and country fixed effects and country...

A large literature in macroeconomics assumes a social objective function, W(p, U), where inflation, p, and unemployment, U, are bads. This paper provides some of the first formal evidence for such an approach. It uses data on the reported well-being levels of approximately one quarter of a...

This paper analyses subjective economic well-being in several Eastern European countries from 1991 to 1995. Economic well-being explains a significant part of the variation in overall life satisfaction of Eastern Europeans. In an ordered logit model, the determinants of subjective economic...

Ist gesellschaftlicher Wohlstand ohne ökonomisches Wachstum möglich? Dieses Paper gibt einen Überblick über jüngere wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen zum Thema. Schwerpunkte sind Begründungen und Ausprägungen von Wachstumsskepsis, alternative Wohlstandsindikatoren und Alternativen zur...

Die vorliegende Analyse auf Basis des Eurobarometers 56.1 (2001) stellt sich diese Frage nach der Lebens- und Arbeitssituation von Selbstständigen. Wie unterscheiden sich Selbstständige und abhängig Beschäftigte und wie heterogen sind die Selbstständigen untereinander? Der Schwerpunkt der...

Life satisfaction is quite heterogeneously distributed across countries of the enlarged European Union. Previous research has shown how living conditions within individual countries, such as access to material and emotional resources, are important for personal well-being, but it has neglected...