Making participants estimate the prescriptive norm increases generosity in a Dictator Game (DG). Authors have interpreted this result in terms of Norm Focus Theory (Cialdini et al., 1990). Nonetheless, non-normative explanations have not been discarded yet. We replicated the effect of...

This is the first article that uses panel data to investigate the impact of individuals' self‐perceived relative income on life satisfaction. Analyses show that the self‐perceived relative income has a significant impact on life satisfaction, but the impact is asymmetric. The decline in life...

We analyze the roots of politicians' preferences for redistribution by exploring whether early life experiences have persistent, long-run effects on U.S. Members of Congress' voting records. We study whether having experienced an economic recession during early adulthood affected their positions...

We define and axiomatically characterize an index of ethnic stratification that measures the extent to which the hierarchy in socio-economic positions across the individuals of a society follows ethnolinguistic lines. This index generalizes the idea of between-group inequality to situations...

The logic of people's capitalism is explained from the giant contradiction between the assumptions of economics and those of non-ego based behavior. Current social scientific research provides enough of the theory, facts, and figures necessary for various methods, many inter-related, by which...

We study the relationship between segregation and preferences for redistribution in Europe. We measure segregation as the incidence of assortative mating in terms of education and occupation. Assortative mating is measured at the regional level for 10 European countries using the IPUMS data. We...

Research on the effects of positional concerns on individuals’ attitudes and behavior in certain policy-relevant areas is lacking. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between positional concerns, charitable giving and social capital. We use data from the “Caucasus Barometer”...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect on subjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types of benchmarks. Dynamic comparisons outweigh static ones. Internal benchmarks are more important than external reference...

After the introduction in Section 2, we very briefly sketch out current theoretical and empirical developments in the social sciences. In our view, they all point in the same direction: toward the acute and increasing need for multidisciplinary longitudinal data covering a wide range of living...