This paper explores the relationship between social capital and happiness both in Europe as a whole, as well as in its four main geographical macro-regions – North, South, East and West – separately. We test the hypothesis of whether social capital, in its three-fold definition established...

Many aspects of social welfare are intrinsically multidimensional. Composite indices at-tempting to reduce this complexity to a unique measure abound in many areas of economics and public policy. Comparisons based on such measures depend, sometimes critically, on how the different dimensions of...

This paper investigates the welfare effects of labor market institutions, placing an emphasis on how the institutions’ effects are differentiated by socio-demographic subgroups. We study how life satisfaction is affected by employment protection and the level and duration of unemployment...

The citizens of Madagascar, and especially the capital Antananarivo, display marked support for democracy: adoption of its principles, rejection of authoritarian regimes, etc. The poor populations are no different from the other social groups in this respect. Nevertheless, living in a poor...

Social well-being is intrinsically multidimensional. Welfare indices attempting to reduce this complexity to a unique measure abound in many areas of economics and public policy. Ranking alternatives based on such measures depends, sometimes critically, on how the different dimensions of welfare...

The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, some 10,000 years ago, triggered the first demographic explosion in history. Along with population, working time increased, while food consumption remained at the subsistence level. For that reason, most anthropologists regard the adoption of...

The measurement of individual happiness challenges the notion that revealed preferences only reliably and empirically reflect individual utility. Reported subjective well-being is a broader concept than traditional decision utility; it also includes concepts like experience and procedural...

We examine the possibility of constructing social ordering functions, each of which associates a social ordering over the feasible pairs of allocations and allocation rules with each simple production economy. Three axioms on the admissible class of social ordering functions are introduced,...

The paper empirically investigates if individuals who supply volunteer work are more satisfied with three domain satisfactions - leisure, friends' relationships and economic situation – than nonvolunteers. Using Istat's (Italian Central Statistical Office) Multiscopo data set for the period...

Besides the theoretical approach, the paper also includes an research conducted with students of the Faculty of Jornalism and Communication at the University of Bucarest. The main objective of this research was to determine the extent to which the media fiction (television series for youth)...