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For representative German panel data, we show that voluntary job switching leads to relatively high levels of life satisfaction, though only for some time, whereas the impact of exogenously triggered job changes is ambiguous. Risk aversion interacts negatively with this effect in life satisfaction. Analysing time-use data and well-being indicators for various areas of life, we find evidence that involuntary job mobility turns out to be harmful for satisfaction with family life. By linking this relatively new measure of family well-being to domestic events, such as future child births, our paper reveals a behaviourally valid predictor of great economic relevance.

High school baseball is very popular in Japan. All games of the high school baseball tournaments are publicly broadcasted. This paper hypothesizes that high school baseball influences the happiness level of the Japanese. Individual level data in Japan was used to test this hypothesis. The key findings of the study were as follows. (1) The number of wins of a team representing a prefecture increased the happiness level of its residents. (2) This effect was only observed for residents of large cities and not for other areas. (3) For migrants who had moved from rural to urban areas, the effect of their home team wins was greater than that of the wins of the team representing their current residence. This effect was significant in cases where the cultural climate of the host area differed from that of the migrant’s home area. The findings of this study support the argument that a scarcity of goods related to the residential community increases the influence of high school baseball on happiness. Further, nostalgia for home influences migrants’ happiness, and this influence is greater than the attachment they form to their current residential community.

Over the Great Recession real wages stagnated and unemployment increased. Concurrently, food prices rose sharply, outstripping growth in food expenditure, and leading to a reduction in calories purchased. This has led to concern about rising food poverty. We study British households to assess how they adjusted to changes in the economic environment. We show they switched to cheaper calories; implying food consumption was smoother than expenditure. We use longitudinal data to quantify the way households lowered their per calorie spending, and show they done this in part by increasing shopping effort, and without lowering the nutritional quality of their groceries.

This paper builds upon Cunha’s (2015) subjective rationality model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on their children’s early skill formation. We propose that this subjective belief is determined partly by locus of control (LOC), i.e., the extent to which individuals believe that their actions can influence future outcomes. Consistent with the theory, we show that maternal LOC measured at the 12th week of gestation strongly predicts maternal attitudes towards parenting style and actual time investments. We also utilize maternal LOC to improve the specification typically used to estimate skill production function parameters. ispartof: The Economic Journal vol:128 issue:608 pages:298-329 ispartof: location:England status: published

In this paper we investigate the factors affecting income levels, income growth, and poverty reduction in rural Indonesia following the crisis of 1997/98. We particu- larly investigate the relative roles of non-farm incomes, productivity improvements achieved via changes in crops versus improvements on the same crops, and demographic changes induced by the crisis on income dynamics in rural Indonesia. Using a unique household panel data set for Central Sulawesi that allows us to control for a large set of household and geographical characteristics, household fixed effects as well as endogeneity issues, we find that falling household size and the adoption and intensification of new cash crop varieties can explain a substantial part of the observed post-crisis developments. Moreover, we compare our results to cross-sectional data from SUSENAS, Indonesia\'s large scale national household survey. While the overall determinants of rural incomes are very similar across both data sets, we find that the importance of agricultural self-employed income seems to be higher in Central Sulawesi than in most other parts of Indonesia. Although several factors could explain these differences, lessons from our Central Sulawesi data suggests that unexploited potentials in the production of cash crops in other areas of Indonesia might contribute to these findings.

The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states that differ in income distributions, population sizes and life longevity. This may require social eva luation principles to be sensitive to the quality, the quantity and the duration of lives. This paper 1) reviews some of the normative issues at stake, 2) proposes and discusses some specific methods to address them in a generalized utilitarian framework, and 3) briefly illustrates the application of som e of these methods to the global distribution of incomes, population sizes and longevity over the last century. Depending on the approach taken, it is found inter alia that global social welfare in 2010 can be deemed to be between 1.8 and 407 times that of 1910, the role given to the quantity of lives bei ng particularly important in that assessment.

Using uniquely rich Canadian administrative data from the 1993–2007 period, I find no evidence of rising Employment Insurance (EI) participation across recent-immigrant cohorts and no evidence of rising EI participation with number of years spent in Canada beyond the short period following entrance into the Canadian labour market. I also find little evidence of the rising immigrant participation in Social Assistance (SA), either across recent arrival cohorts or with years in Canada. The results do not appear to be seriously affected by emigration and attrition within each immigrant cohort. While the immigrant participation in traditional ‘welfare’ programs such as Social Assistance has generally declined from 1993 to 2007, I show that Canada Child Tax Benefit and other federal and provincial programs aimed at providing financial assistance to families with children have become a major source of transfer income to immigrant families. A l’aide de donnees administratives canadiennes particulierement riches pour la periode 1993–2007, on decouvre qu’il n’y a pas d’evidence de participation plus elevee au programme d’Assurance Emploi (AE) d’une cohorte d’immigrants recents a l’autre dans le temps, non plus que d’evidence de participation accrue a l’AE des immigrants recents avec le nombre d’annees passees au Canada, si ce n’est pour la courte periode qui suit l’entree dans le marche du travail canadien. On ne trouve que peu de support pour l’hypothese de participation accrue a l’Assistance Sociale (AS) tant d’une cohorte a la suivante qu’avec le nombre d’annees passees au Canada. Ces resultats ne semblent pas affectes par l’emigration ou l’attrition a l’interieur de chaque cohorte. Alors que la participation des immigrants aux programmes de bien-etre traditionnels comme l’Assistance Sociale ont generalement decline entre 1993 et 2007, on montre que la prestation fiscale canadienne pour enfants et autres programmes federaux et provinciaux visant a fournir de l’assistance financiere aux familles avec enfants sont devenus une source majeure de revenus de transfert pour les familles d’immigrants.

The study of multidimensional deprivation has become one of the most relevant lines of research in the analysis of low-income households. The search for significant relationships between multidimensional deprivation and income poverty has been a central issue and most empirical studies have found a very weak link. This paper aims at examining the possibility of an aggregation bias in national studies, which could conceal the diversity of experiences and patterns to be found in the different regions. Latent class models are used to define deprivation indices and the Spanish Survey on Income and Living Conditions is used. The results seem to show that the absence of significant relationships between both phenomena also appears when the sample of household is disaggregated regionally. Nonetheless, the decomposition of these two phenomena’s determinants reveals some common explanatory factors.

Cost-effectiveness analysis of alternative medical treatments relies on having a measure of effectiveness, and many regard the quality adjusted life year (QALY) to be the current ‘gold standard.’ In order to compute QALYs, we require a suitable system for describing a person's health state, and a utility measure to value the quality of life associated with each possible state. There are a number of different health state descriptive systems, and we focus here on one known as the EQ-5D. Data for estimating utilities for different health states have a number of features that mean care is necessary in statistical modelling. There is interest in the extent to which valuations of health may differ between different countries and cultures, but few studies have compared preference values of health states obtained from different countries. This article applies a nonparametric model to estimate and compare EQ-5D health state valuation data obtained from two countries using Bayesian methods. The data set is the US and UK EQ-5D valuation studies where a sample of 42 states defined by the EQ-5D was valued by representative samples of the general population from each country using the time trade-off technique. We estimate a utility function across both countries which explicitly accounts for the differences between them, and is estimated using the data from both countries. The article discusses the implications of these results for future applications of the EQ-5D and for further work in this field. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper contributes to the theory of social accounting. As such, it tries to extend earlier literature on the welfare equivalence of the comprehensive net national product in two main directions, both of which refer to the public sector. One is by considering welfare measurement problems associated with redistributive policy and public good provision, when the public revenues are raised by distortionary taxes. The other is by addressing the consequences of a 'federation-like' decision structure, where independent tax and expenditure decisions are made both by the central government and by lower level governments. In particular, the analysis shows how so called vertical fiscal external effects, which are associated with tax base sharing among the central and lower level governments, contribute to social accounting.

Who records the largest drops in life satisfaction when they move into unemployment? Do men experience a larger drop in life satisfaction than women? Do Australians and Americans record a larger drop than Europeans? Using an Australian panel data-set (the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey of Australia), this paper finds that the unemployed in Australia report lower life satisfaction than observationally equivalent employed people (holding current income constant). Being currently unemployed is estimated to be equivalent to the loss of $42,100 annual income for men and $86,300 annual income for women. Thus, the drop in life satisfaction, after controlling for unobserved time invariant characteristics, associated with unemployment is larger for women than men. The impact of unemployment on life satisfaction is large compared to the drops in life satisfaction associated with changes in income and disability status. It is found that unemployment is less painful for men in Australia than for men in Germany and the United Kingdom. The paper hypothesises that the large fall in life satisfaction may be the result of a drop in life-time earnings, as well as a ‘psychological’ effect.

This paper extends familiar results on the optimal pricing of publicly provided goods and price cap regulations in a stochastic dominance framework. The key advantage is that the assessment as to whether pricing or price cap reforms are poverty reducing or welfare improving is not contingent on any given social welfare function. Rather, robust assessments of the impact of reforms can be made for wide classes of ethical judgments.

This paper is the first of its kind to study quality of life responses of crime victims. Using cross-sectional data from the OHS97 survey of South Africa, we show that victims report significantly lower well-being than the non-victims, ceteris paribus. Happiness is lower for nonvictimized respondents currently living in higher crime areas. However, we find a strong evidence for females that criminal victimization hurts, but hurts less if the crime rate on our reference group is high.

Several authors have suggested using the jackknife technique to approximate a standard error for the Gini coefficient. It has also been shown that the Gini measure can be obtained simply from an artificial ordinary least square (OLS) regression based on the data and their ranks. We show that obtaining an exact analytical expression for the standard error is actually a trivial matter. Further, by extending the regression framework to one involving seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR), several interesting hypotheses regarding the sensitivity of the Gini coefficient to changes in the data are readily tested in a formal manner.