When individuals' utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the maximization of aggregate utility yields an equal income distribution. This...

Well-being (i.e., satisfaction, happiness) is a latent variable, impossible to observe directly. Hence, questionnaires ask people to grade their well-being in different life domains. The most common practice-comparing well-being by means of descriptive analysis or linear regressions-ignores that...

Armut ist ein weiter Begriff. Die Kriterien, wann Armut anfängt, sind durchaus umstritten. So erhalten in Deutschland gut 9% der Bevölkerung Grundsicherungsleistungen, nach den EU-weit einheitlichen Laeken-Indikatoren sind aber über 20% armutsgefährdet. Ein Blick auf die jeweiligen...

This paper provides arguments in favor of using subjective questions as a proxy to measure welfare and well-being. This approach makes it possible to avoid having to define welfare and well-being means and having to identify the relevant indicators. Instead, individuals themselves define their...

This paper examines a famous puzzle in social science. Why do some nations report such high happiness? Denmark, for instance, regularly tops the league table of rich nations' well-being; Great Britain and the US enter further down; France and Italy do relatively poorly. Yet the explanation for...

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom...

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom...

The versions of 2002-2003 and 2008-2009 of the Household Budget Survey (POF) from the IBGE bring two questions on the subjective evaluation of Brazilian families about the sufficiency of their income. While the first question draws direct information on the degree of family's satisfaction with...

Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat 2010 die sozialrechtlichen Regelbedarfsleistungen für verfassungswidrig erklärt und Nachbesserungen gefordert. Im Juli 2014 hat nun das Bundesverfassungsgericht die eingeleiteten Maßnahmen als gerade noch verfassungsgemäß bewertet. Um aktuell die...

This study appraises non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the novel first order dominance approach developed by Arndt et al. (2012). It examines five dimensions of deprivation: education, water, sanitation, shelter, and energy-using comparable datasets, the Nigeria Demographic...