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Do we really know what makes us happy? A review of the economic literature on the factors associated with subjective well-being

There is increasing interest in the “economics of happiness”, reflected by the number of articles that are appearing in mainstream economics journals that consider subjective well-being (SWB) and its determinants. This paper provides a detailed review of this literature. It focuses on papers that have been published in economics journals since 1990, as well as some key reviews in psychology and important ...

Growth Still Is Good for the Poor

Incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes. This is because, in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades, changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes in average income. The variation in changes in quintile shares is also small relative to the variation in ...

Growth, Inequality, and Social Welfare: Cross-Country Evidence

We use social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, we find that most of the cross-country and over-time variation in changes in social welfare is due to changes in average incomes. ...

Automatic Stabilizers and Economic Crisis: US vs. Europe

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the US. In the case of an unemployment shock 48 per cent of the shock are absorbed in the EU, compared to 34 ...

Automatic Stabilizers, Economic Crisis and Income Distribution in Europe

This paper investigates to what extent the tax and transfer systems in Europe protect households at different income levels against losses in current income caused by economic downturns like the present financial crisis. We use a multi country micro simulation model to analyse how shocks on market income and employment are mitigated by taxes and transfers. We find that the aggregate redistributive ...

Social Protection as an Automatic Stabilizer

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of social protection systems in Europe and the US to provide (income) insurance against macro level shocks in terms of automatic stabilizers. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38% of a proportional income shock and 47% of an idiosyncratic unemployment shock in Europe, compared to 32% and 34% in the US. There is large heterogeneity within Europe with stabilization ...

Recent evolution of poverty in the European countries

The evolution of economic inequality in the EU countries during the nineties

Integrating Refugees: Insights from the Past: Editorial

Half of the refugees in Germany found their first job through social contacts

In Germany, the majority of people tend to find work through friends, acquaintances, and relatives when they first enter the labor market or switch jobs. The same applies to immigrants and their offspring. Integrating refugees into the labor market is considered crucial to their overall integration into society, yet little is known about how they land their first jobs. The present paper attempts to ...