With the availability of new techniques to close wine bottles avoiding the risk of “corky” taste the tradition of closing wine bottles with cork stoppers is on the retreat. As a consequence the Mediterranean cork oak forests with their rich biodiversity are endangered since their cultivation...

This paper lends legitimacy to the food share as an indicator of welfare by demonstrating the conditions necessary in empirical work for the Engel method of estimating equivalence scales to provide an exact measure of welfare. In analogy to a money metric of utility, the Engel's food share is...

Subjective beliefs and behavior regarding the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test for prostate cancer were surveyed among attendees of the 2006 meeting of the American Economic Association. Logical inconsistency was measured in percentage deviations from a restriction imposed by Bayes’ Rule...

This paper studies the effect of the introduction of income inequalities in a model of geopolitical organization. We assume the existence of two groups of agents with different incomes. We focus on the policy effects of changes in income differential between the groups and changes in the...

We compare reported job satisfaction with vignette evaluations of hypothetical jobs by using a British, Greek and Dutch data set, containing 95 randomly assigned vignettes. In order to test comparability of international data sets recently the method of anchoring vignettes has been introduced by...

This paper provides arguments in favor of using subjective questions as a proxy to measure welfare and well-being. This approach makes it possible to avoid having to define welfare and well-being means and having to identify the relevant indicators. Instead, individuals themselves define their...

There is a small but growing literature on the determinants of social capital. Most of these studies use a measure of trust to define social capital empirically. In this paper we use three different measures of social capital: the size of the individual’s social network, the extent of their...

The abysmal economic performance by African States in the past three decades is attributable to a host of known factors – mismanagement of resources, graft, and bureaucratic corruption (Mauro, 1995); but of all the known culprits that have so far suppressed economic growth, none are more...

The paper presents evidence that validate the focusing illusion. Specifically, the forecasted impact of a basketball championship on students’ subjective well-being was exaggerated because of their intense focus on the event. However, the self-reported states of being for life domains not...

Air quality affects human’s well being in various ways. Air providing the most important life-support function sustains human health and enables the existence of all ecosystems. Although clean air is considered to be a basic requirement for human health and well-being, economic development and...