There is a widespread feeling that a substantial and increasing share of activities take place outside the official economy. This holds, in particular, for developing and transition but also for high income economies. Such activities are unrecorded by the system of national income accounting,...

Most dimension reduction methods based on nonparametric smoothing are highly sensitive to outliers and to data coming from heavy tailed distributions. We show that the recently proposed MAVE and OPG methods by Xia et al. (2002) allow us to make them robust in a relatively straightforward way...

A framework is proposed for organizing phenomena related to the (mis)prediction of utility, in particular neglecting adaptation. A categorization is introduced that accounts for asymmetries in misprediction. In decision-making, goods and activities satisfying extrinsic desires are more salient...

In many countries environmental policies and regulations are implemented to improve environmental quality and thus individuals' well-being. However, how do individuals value the environment? In this paper, we review the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) representing a new non-market valuation...

People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals? utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we...

This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost to his or her survival. The social cost of political...

This paper explored the determinants of survival in a life and death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested to see whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a quasi-natural...