Empirical evidence contradicts the view that savings rates are independent of permanent income levels. Instead, a distinctive nonlinear relationship between savings and permanent income has been found. What explains this result? Using Robert Frank's model of the demand for nonpositional goods,...

It is shown that the component statistics of the HDI are highly correlated with one another. The paper demonstrates that an implication of this correlation is that a wide range of index weights produce indexes that are statistically identical to the HDI. Indexes with only two of the three HDI...