A perception at the core of studies that consider the link between social rank and stress (typically measured by the so-called stress hormone cortisol) is that the link is direct. Examples of such studies are Bartolomucci (2007), Beery and Kaufer (2015), and Koolhaas et al. (2017). A recent and...

Temporary migration is a widely observed phenomenon among poor rural households, mostly related to agricultural seasonality. However, household preferences for temporary migration in comparison to longer-term migration, and the differential effects of these migrations on household livelihoods...

The merger of populations expands the comparison space of incomes. As a result, measures of the income-based social stress and of the income inequality of the constituent populations need to be replaced by new measures. To this end, we develop a procedure for calculating the aggregate social...

This study investigates key institutional factors promoting the adoption of laser land levelling (LLL), a technology that has gained wide popularity among farmers in northwestern India despite being indivisible. The main objective is to evaluate the role of service providers, offering LLL on a...

Malnutrition in its various forms is a serious problem in many countries, contributing to human suffering, large healthcare costs, and hampered economic and human development. While various policies to reduce malnutrition exist, such policies typically fail to consider cultural factors. Here, we...

The social stress experienced by an individual from having a low relative income or from having a low income-based rank is a derivative of the individual's location in social space, and is the outcome of unfavorable comparisons with other individuals in that space. (The term social space stands...

Sen (1973 and 1997) presents the Gini coefficient of income inequality in a population as follows. "In any pair-wise comparison the man with the lower income can be thought to be suffering from some depression on finding his income to be lower. Let this depression be proportional to the...

We formulate a rule for allocating asylum seekers that is based on the social preferences of the native workers of the receiving countries. To derive the rule, we construct for each country a social welfare function, SWF, where the social welfare of a population is determined both by the...

The inflation surge in recent years is having profound social, economic, and political consequences. In particular, food price increases strongly affect low-income segments of the population. What makes this period so unusual is the breadth of price pressures that are affecting both low and...

Using two rounds of panel firm- and worker-level data, this paper studies the gender gap in monetary and non-monetary compensation as well as work-related wellbeing among full-time workers in the agro-processing and leather sectors in Ethiopia. After controlling for year-fixed effects, the...