Which of Germanys regions is the most attractive? Where is it best to live and work - on objective grounds? These questions are summed up in the concept “quality of life”. This paper uses recent research projects that determine this parameter to examine the spatial distribution of quality of...

This paper continues my research program on violence and terrorism started 15 years ago. It presents in the first part through empirical exercises, the suitability of The Beveridge and Nelson decomposition of economic time series for pointing out the occurrence of terrorist attacks. It presents...

Die Verteilung des gesellschaftlichen Reichtums ist von zentraler Bedeutung für die wirtschaftliche, soziale und kulturelle Entwicklung eines Landes. Unabhängig von der jeweiligen wirtschafts- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Sicht ist die Einkommensverteilung ein wichtiger Baustein zur Erklärung...

This paper discusses housing condition in Tunisia in the late 1990s, using a housing condition indicator that relies on less arbitrary weights. Evidences from household survey data indicate that despite the substantial improvement of tunisian's housing condition between 1994 and 2001, great...

We present a new version of the overtaking criterion, which we call generalized time-invariant overtaking. The generalized time-invariant overtaking criterion (on the space of infinite utility streams) is defined by extending proliferating sequences of complete and transitive binary relations...

A taboo is an "unthinkable" action, that is, even the thought of violating it triggers social punishment. Taboos are the social "thought police," discouraging individuals from considering certain type of actions. We consider a simple model in which taboos are part of the definition of one's...

This study reports data from a field experiment that was conducted to investigate the relevance of gift-exchange for charitable giving. Roughly 10,000 solicitation letters were sent to potential donors in the experiment. One third of the letters contained no gift, one third contained a small...

Female 'empowerment' has increasingly become a policy goal, both as an end to itself and as a means to achieving other development goals. Microfinance in particular has often been argued, but not without controversy, to be a tool for empowering women. Here, using a randomized controlled trial,...

This paper surveys major empirical regularities concerning changes in earnings inequality in Europe and the US over the past 25 years. Next, it indicates which of these regularities can be explained within the competitive demand-supply framework of analysis and what is left unexplained. Finally,...

This paper develops a simple theoretical model that can be implemented to estimate the willingness to pay for distributive justice. We derive a formula that allows one to recover the willingness to pay for distributive justice from the estimated coefficients of a probit regression and fiscal...