“Does economic openness increase income?” is retested using quantity measures of trade, finance, and domestic economic size, and the short answer is: “It de-pends”. The results show that Africa and the Americas lose from both trade and financial openness, while Asia gains from trade...

The analyses of two online surveys involving college students found evidence that using a college basketball championship as focal event resulted in unstable subjective evaluations of happiness. However, the analyses also found that the focusing illusion had modest spillover on subjective...

The paper presents evidence of a positive but very small long-run relationship between income growth and happiness. Such finding is usually presented as a refutation of the Easterlin Paradox. The paper, however, argues that what the evidence actually reveals is that income growth has very little...

The subjective well-being approach to environmental valuation is applied to analyze the valuation of greenhouse gas emissions with a fairness-adjustment in the valuation exercise. Results indicate that industrialized countries have high willingness-to-pay to reduce emissions. Developing...

A procedure for identifying the happy individuals in society is indispensable to efforts to align public policy with the needs of the citizenry. Individual self-reports on happiness, however, must first meet the dual requirements of cardinality and (at least) relative interpersonal comparability...

The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) was adopted in the 20th anniversary edition of the <italic>Human Development Reports</italic>, in 2010. In using a penalty set-up for the calculations of the IHDI, however, the results overestimated the adjustments. This article suggests a revision to the...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

We develop a model to show that cartels that produce goods with lower durability are easier to sustain implicitly. This observation gen- erates the following results: 1) implicit cartels have an incentive to pro- duce goods with an inefficiently low level of durability; 2) a monopoly or explicit...

In this paper, a promotion tournament is considered, where, at the beginning of the tournament, it is unknown how long the tournament lasts. Further, the promotion decision is based on the assessments of a supervisor with imperfect recall. In line with psychological research, the supervisor is...

Policy makers often decide to liberalize foreign bank entry but at the same time restrict the mode of entry. We study how different entry modes affect the interest rate for loans in a model in which domestic banks possess private information about their incumbent clients but foreign banks have...