Search

The importance of social comparison in shaping individual utility has been widely documented by subjective well-being literature. So far, income and unemployment have been the main dimensions considered in social comparison. This paper aims to investigate whether subjective well-being is influenced by inter-personal comparison with respect to health. Thus, we study the effects of the health of others and relative health hypotheses on two measures of subjective well-being: happiness and subjective health. Using data from the Italian Health Conditions survey, we show that a high incidence of chronic conditions and disability among reference groups negatively affects both happiness and subjective health. Such effects are stronger among people in the same condition. These results, robust to different econometric specifications and estimation techniques, suggest the presence of some sympathy in individual preferences with respect to health and reveal that other people's health status serves as a benchmark to assess one's own health condition.

Objectives. We aim to understand why blacks are significantly less likely than whites to perpetuate their middle-class status across generations. To do so, we focus on the potentially different associations between parental job loss and youth's educational attainment in black and white middle-class families.Methods. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), following those children “born” into the survey between 1968 and 1979 and followed through age 21. We conduct multivariate regression analyses to test the association between parental job loss during childhood and youth's educational attainment by age 21.Results. We find that parental job loss is associated with a lesser likelihood of obtaining any postsecondary education for all offspring, but that the association for blacks is almost three times as strong. A substantial share of the differential impact of job loss on black and white middle-class youth is explained by race differences in household wealth, long-run measures of family income, and, especially, parental experience of long-term unemployment.Conclusions. These findings highlight the fragile economic foundation of the black middle class and suggest that intergenerational persistence of class status in this population may be highly dependent on the avoidance of common economic shocks.

This focus of this paper is not Surabaya's increasingly free-flowing streets, but the people those streets displace. Based on research in a low-income neighbourhood, or kampung, of Indonesia's second largest city, this paper shows how the street facilitates displacement and exacerbates the marginalisation of underemployed kampung men. This argument is set against the struggles over the use of public space between Surabaya's kampung residents and the municipality since independence and is grounded through the biographical detail of seven kampung men over the ten years since the economic crisis of 1998.

Poverty is often regarded as the "root cause" of trafficking, but the linkages between poverty, a lack of development and trafficking are complex. For example, there is some evidence to suggest that victims of cross-border trafficking are more likely to originate from middle-income rather than lower-income countries. Trafficking and development have tended to be treated as very separate policy areas and the assessment of the development impact of counter-trafficking programmes is still at an early stage. This paper outlines a possible framework for a more evidence-based approach to understanding the linkages between trafficking, trafficking policy and human development. The paper argues that the human development gains from greater mobility could be significantly enhanced if there was greater coherence between policies to combat trafficking and policies to promote development.

The Settlement of Tithes of 1638 can be tested for biases in its London rents. Even so, it proves to be a relatively good source for seventeenth-century London, and for calculating associated median and mean rents, as well as a Gini coefficient of inequality for the distribution of resources. Through other evidence in the Settlement, rent/income ratios for London can be approximated, and from them estimates made of London's median income. Median rents and income also allow estimates of the percentage of Londoners in poverty. Though the last is inevitably disputable, the estimate holds up well to testing by other evidence.