Der deutsche Staat hat im Jahr 2015 rund 888 Milliarden Euro für Sozialleistungen ausgegeben. Ein Prinzip des deutschen Sozialsystems ist das der Bedürftigkeit. Menschen, die nachweislich bedürftig sind, erhalten Leistungen des Staates. Dieses System führt jedoch zu hohen Bürokratiekosten....

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...

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broader range of questions than in previous studies. In questions inserted into a...

The standard theory of anti - poverty targeting assumes individual incomes cannot be observed, but statistical properties of income distribution in broadly defined groups are known. "Indicator targeting" rules are then derived for the forms of transfers conditioned on group membership 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...

Using over one million observations, from 6 Transition countries and 14 "old" European countries, we show that, in stable EU economies, other people's income affects my utility directly, through comparison effects, whereas in more volatile Transition economies it affects me indirectly, in a...

This paper investigates the main determinants of income inequality in transition countries during the period 1990-2018. To this end, we address a major methodological challenge that lies at the core of the cross-country literature on income inequality: the potential endogeneity of income growth,...

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...

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...