In a recently published article, Bruni and Stanca (2008) suggest that television viewing has a negative impact on life satisfaction. In this note we argue that the empirical approach they use (an approach that omits the main effect of TV viewing in life satisfaction) is problematic. We estimate...

Using comparable survey data from twelve European countries from 1994 to 2001 we investigate households’ attitudes towards mortgage indebtedness. We find that a given debt burden creates much higher distress in countries with fewer mortgage holders relative to countries where a significant...

This paper uses data from the British National Child Development Study to investigate the relationship between social interaction and participation in the stock market through holding stocks and/or shares at the individual level. In accordance with the existing literature, the results reveal...

We investigate the effects of both trust and sociability for stock market participation, the role of which has been examined separately by existing finance literature. We use internationally comparable household data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe supplemented with...

Using comparable survey data from twelve European countries we investigate households' attitudes towards mortgage indebtedness. We find that a given debt burden creates much higher distress in Southern countries, France and Belgium, where fewer households have a mortgage outstanding relative to...

We study a general class of models with social interactions that might display multiple equilibria. We propose an estimation procedure for these models and evaluate its efficiency and computational feasibility relative to different approaches taken to the curse of dimensionality implied by the...

This paper investigates the impact of peer observation on the consumption decisions of rural households in Thailand using a lab-in-the-field experiment. We find that those groups that observe each other show lower within group standard deviation in their decisions. Thus, we find evidence for...

The aim of the paper is an examination wheatear the social spillover of consumption behaviours differs for the homophily and heterophily based structure of interactions. As an approximation of agents' behaviours households' expenditures with the reference person attributes were used. The...

Each week, the Dutch Postcode Lottery (PCL) randomly selects a postal code, and distributes cash and a new BMWto lottery participants in that code. We study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors.Consistent with the life-cycle hypothesis, the effects on winners’...

We investigate the relationship between social interaction and household finances using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We contribute to the existing literature by exploring the relationship between a wide range of aspects of household finances and social interaction, rather than...