As societies are increasingly concerned with social risks, it is important to evaluate risks not only from an individual perspective, but also from a societal one. Many increases in social risk involve a simultaneous increase in risk and inequality. This paper presents an experiment which...

After having been ignored for a long time by economists, happiness is becoming an object of serious research in 21st century economics. In Section 2 we sketch the present status of happiness economics. In Section 3 we consider the practical applicability of happiness economics, retaining the...

Expectations and information about the growth of GDP per capita have a large influence on decisions made by private and public economic agents. It will be argued here that GDP (per capita) is far from a robust indicator of social welfare, and that its use as such must be regarded as a serious...

In this paper it is argued that subjective well-being of the individual depends on two types of variables. The first type consists of characteristics of the individual himself, such as age, health, income, etc. The second type of variables consists of the characteristics of the individuals...

We provide evidence that the social norm (expectation) of work has a detrimental causal effect on the mental well-being of individuals not able to abide by it. Using SHARE data on men aged 50+ from 10 European countries, we identify the social norm of work effect in a difference-in-differences...

It is argued that the concept of well-being inequality cannot be properly defined without taking the reference process into account. The reference effect depends on how frequently individuals compare with others and on the degree of social transparency in society. In this paper we employ the...

We conduct three lab experiments and use field data from the Dutch Math Olympiad to study how the gender gap in willingness to compete evolves in response to experience. The main result is that women are more likely than men to stop competing if they lose. In the Dutch Math Olympiad, this means...

We test the hypothesis, based on popular and theoretical perspectives, that entrepreneurs are more action-oriented than other occupational groups. We compare their playing strategies in an optimal stopping game using a randomized online experiment among 100s of entrepreneurs, managers and...

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two...

Most evidence of hyperbolic discounting is based on violations of either stationarity or time consistency as observed in choice experiments. These choice reversals may however also result from time-varying discount rates. Hyperbolic discounting is a plausible explanation for choice reversals...