We examine how low and high skilled internal emigration causally affect investments in human capital at origin. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence of a disincentive mechanism through which individuals refrain from education should low skilled emigration prove a viable alternative. Our...

We show that a social planner who seeks to allocate a given sum in order to reduce efficiently the social stress of a population, as measured by the aggregate relative deprivation of the population, pursues a disbursement procedure that is identical to the procedure adhered to by a Rawlsian...

In many countries, schools have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by splitting up classes. While the purpose of dividing classes is clearly health-related, the process of doing so poses an interesting question: what is the best way to divide a class so as to maximize the incentive for students...

In a recent article, "Reexamining the influence of conditional cash transfers on migration from a gendered lens," Hughes (2019) claimed that conditional cash transfers, CCT, limit the likelihood of migration by women, compensating them for giving up an attractive migration option. I question the...

Drawing on two assumptions: that menopause is an instrument for the efficient regulation of the duration of a biologically expensive state, and that people have children in order to obtain support from them in old age, we set out a new idea that seeks to explain both the occurrence of menopause...

We study the relative risk aversion of an individual with particular social preferences: his wellbeing is influenced by his relative wealth, and by how concerned he is about having low relative wealth. Holding constant the individual's absolute wealth, we obtain two results. First, if the...

We estimate the long-term effects of start-up subsidies (SUS) for the unemployed on subjective outcome indicators of well-being, as measured by the participants' satisfaction in different domains. This extends previous analyses of the current German SUS program ("Gründungszuschuss") that...

Following Sen's (1973) characterization of the Gini coefficient as a ratio between a measure of aggregate income-based stress ("depression" in Sen's terminology) and aggregate income, we transform the Gini coefficient into a social welfare function rather than having the Gini coefficient feature...

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...