The picture on disparities in productivity growth and in unemployment across European regions reveals the existence of a slow and not very systematic convergence of labor productivity toward a common level, and of an even more uncertain convergence of unemployment rates. This paper uses a...

This book is a welcome consolidation and extension of the recent expanding debates on happiness and economics. Happiness and economics, as a new field for research, is now of pivotal interest particularly to welfare economists and psychologists. This Handbook provides an unprecedented forum for...

Economic growth and unemployment exhibit an ambiguous relationship – according to empirical studies. This ambiguity can be investigated by observing the role of the underground economy in shaping the productivity of firms. Indeed, unemployment may be absorbed by underground firms, which adopt...

Scitovsky's <italic>The Joyless Economy</italic> is especially well-known in recent economic studies on happiness. However, his insightful contributions have not been taken up as they deserve, mainly because they were, and still are, too original. By reconstructing Scitovsky's analysis on the basis of all his...

The recent debate on happiness in economics has revived interest in Scitovsky's 1976 book The Joyless Economy, which aims at extending the concept of welfare, and explaining the income-happiness paradox, i.e. “why [American] unprecedented and fast-growing prosperity had left its beneficiaries...

Scitovsky is known as a forerunner of behavioural economics simply because he drew heavily on psychology and claimed that people's choices may be "joyless" (Scitovsky, The joyless economy, 1976). However, a careful reformulation of his analysis shows that he anticipated a number of insights...

By revisiting Scitovsky's work on well-being, which introduces 'novelty' into the consumer's option set as a peculiar source of satisfaction, this paper finds a number of connections with the recent behavioural economics so as to open new lines on inquiry. First, similarly to behavioural...

Scitovsky laid the foundations for a new theory of people’s well-being in his 1976 book The Joyless Economy. This paper, after a reconstruction of Scitovsky’s analysis throughout the book and his related writings, shows that supporting evidence can be found in recent economic and psychology...