Until now there was little evidence of the influence of large governments on happiness and when it existed, it was positive. We show that structural government consumption and other measures of long-term government imbalances significantly decrease happiness and life satisfaction in European...

This paper deals with the effects of social participation activities on life satisfaction. Using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) for 2010, I present gender specific differences for several social activities, such as club memberships of political, welfare, health or more leisure time...

The socially optimal allocation has been regarded to be unspecifiable because of utility’s interpersonal incomparability, Arrow’s general possibility theorem, and other factors. This paper examines this problem by focusing not on the social welfare function but instead on the utility...

This paper examines the socially optimal allocation by focusing not on the social welfare function but instead on the utility possibility frontier in exogenous growth models with a heterogeneous population. A unique balanced growth path was found on which all of the optimality conditions of all...

This paper explains how to build Lorenz Curves for income distributions and discusses their use for inequality measurement. A short conceptual background, a step-by-step procedure and a simple numerical example illustrate how to calculate and draw Lorenz Curves. A discussion on the use of Lorenz...

This paper illustrates how Crossing Generalised Lorenz (GL) curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options. It starts by illustrating two alternative income distributions...

This paper illustrates how Lorenz Curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds, within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options. After highlighting some drawbacks of using specific functional forms of the Social...

Cross-national studies on happiness have focused on differences in level of happiness. The focus of this paper is on spread in happiness in the nation, also called ‘inequality in happiness’. Inequality in happiness in nations can be measured by the size of the standard deviation of responses...

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...

We propose a mathematical model of `approximate' interpersonal comparisons of well-being, in terms of an incomplete preorder over a space of `psychophysical states'. We argue that this model is consistent with people's intuitions about interpersonal comparisons, intertemporal preferences, and...