For some years now, the Happy Planet Organization presents the so-called ‘Happy Planet Index’ (HPI), which is an index of measuring the trade-off between ecological footprint data and life quality (Happy Life Years, HLYE). Costa Rica emerges from these comparisons as the world’s ‘best...

Minorities continue to be severely underrepresented at the top levels of most occupations despite making dramatic gains in initial access to them. This fact is particularly striking in the legal profession where blacks are well represented in each associate class yet face significantly lower...

This paper uses comparable international data to examine the extent and wage effects of skill mismatches among European university graduates. The results show that the mismatched earn on average 11.7% less than their well-matched counterparts. This effect, however, cannot be regarded as constant...

The subjective well-being approach to valuation is applied to the valuation of income inequality. Results show that objective inequality is a bad in the industrialized economies but a good in the emerging economies. Too much objective inequality is a bad in both areas. Results also show that...

The Clarke pivotal mechanism is inappropriate for nonpecuniary public goods, because the assumption of quasilinear utility is invalid, and because the mechanism gives disproportionate influence to wealthier voters. But by introducing a `stochastic' Clarke tax, we can convert any separable...

Zak & Knack (2001) demonstrate that interpersonal trust substantially impacts economic growth, and that sufficient interpersonal trust is necessary for economic development. To investigate the ability of policy-makers to affect trust levels, this paper builds a formal model characterizing public...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...

We present evidence that ethnic fragmentation explains variations in per capita income, institutions, and schooling better than income inequality when both are treated as endogenous. To do so, we identify instruments for ethnic fractionalization and income inequality based on historical...

This paper revisits one of the bipolarization indices of the large class of Duclos-Estebane-Ray polarization measures. The relationship between polarization, inequality and poverty is analyzed via the index. First, polarization measure for the median is defined and related to the subtraction of...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...