Innovation and technological progress are the key determinants of long-run economic growth and welfare. Therefore, an important question is, how can public policy encourage more innovation? In this chapter, I review some of the empirical findings from various recent studies on innovation and...

Most of the aggregate level analyses on the relationship between objective and subjective measures for well-being have limited themselves to measures of national GDP and mean life satisfaction. We develop this line of research by embedding the analysis into the context of 289 NUTS regions in...

The rate of the elderly population increases rapidly throughout the world. The growth rate of the elderly population in the world is 2.1%, whereas the overall population growth rate is over 1.2 % (Mandiraoglu, 2010). The elderly population rate in the United States varies between 15% and 20 %....

This paper evaluates the effect of ozone pollution on individuals' subjective health satisfaction and well-being, allowing us to capture both direct and indirect effects of ozone pollution on adults. Specifically, we focus on differences between households with and without children. We combine...

The ongoing process of climate change goes along with an increase in the frequency and severity of various sorts of natural disasters. While the existing literature has almost exclusively focused on studying the direct effects resulting from different types of disasters, the effect of changing...

In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of painkiller consumption that combines the theory of health deficit accumulation with the theory of addiction. Chronic pain is conceptualized as a persistent negative shock to lifetime utility that can be treated by pain relief medication. Some...