We present evidence from a randomized Öeld experiment explictly designed to shed light on the role of standard information, goal framed information, and decision task complexity in individualsí choice of payment method. The experiment encouraged 19,707 Clients of the Belgian National O¢ ce...

This document presents a systematic review of empirical approaches to the identification and measurement of the middle class as the concept is used in the applied literature. It then presents an arguably less arbitrary definition of the middle class which is based on sound principles of...

Purpose: Individual well-being has been the focus of analysis among rapidly rising number of economists in the world. Especially, after the ground breaking work of Layard (2005), a variety of factors affecting well-being has been identified in the literature. However, despite its prime...

The standard index of urban quality of life provides an approximated value of the quality of life, since it associates the bundles of amenities observed in urban areas with their implicit marginal prices, and not with the prices of infra-marginal units. In this paper, we adjust the standard...

This paper presents an application of the hedonic approach to measure the monetary price of social relations. We use individual-level data for housing and labor markets in 103 Italian cities to estimate the price of relational amenities and construct monetary indexes of quality of relational...

This paper investigates how financial, trade, institutional and political liberalization policies have affected financial efficiency in Africa. It uses updated data to appraise second generation reforms in order to gather fresh evidence and derive more updated policy implications. The ‘freedom...

Demand for redistribution has been traditionally investigated within a static scenario, giving the perception of a stationary association between individual determinants and preferences. Using repeated cross-sectional survey data from the General Social Survey over the period 1978{2010, we model...

A model is set up where migrants must choose a level of social traits and consumption of ethnic goods. As the consumption level of ethnic goods increases, the migrants become ever more different to the local population and are less assimilated. Less assimilation affects the reaction of the local...

Family entrepreneurs in all honesty cannot grasp this new concept. Just now, while we are still experiencing a worldwide financial and economic crisis, which has by no means been overcome yet, there is talk of increasing taxation of assets. In recent years, small and medium-sized and larger...

The reintroduction of a wealth tax in Germany would not contribute to more fairness in terms of the ability to pay principle. On the contrary: Since wealth in form of human capital is not taxed, a wealth tax would lead to a massive unequal treatment of people with the same ability to pay. The...