We analyze a two-sector, general-equilibrium model of productive matching and sorting, where risky production is carried out by pairs of individuals both exerting effort. Risk-neutral (entrepreneurial) individuals can match either with other risk-neutral individuals, or – acting as employers/...

Does power sharing between competing elites result in franchise extension to non-elites? In this paper, we argue that competing, risk-averse elites will enfranchise non-elites as in-surance against future, uncertain imbalances in relative bargaining power. We show that negligibly small changes...

This paper studies the conditions under which intra-elite conflict leads to a democracy. There are two risk averse elites competing for the appropriation of a unit of social surplus, with an ex-ante uncertainty about their future relative bargaining power, and a large non-elite class unable to...

Using British Household Panel Survey data, for subjects not reporting the highest permitted satisfaction level, we show that the conditional income distribution given a higher reported level of life satisfaction rst-order stochastically dominates the corresponding conditional distribution given...

The Industrial Revolution is often characterized as the culmination of a process of commercialisation; however, the precise nature of such a link remains unclear. This paper models and analyses one such link: the impact of a higher degree of anonymity of market transactions on relative factor...

We consider a model in which appropriate organization fosters innovation, but because of contractibility problems, this bene t cannot be internalized. The organizational design element we focus on is the division of labor, which as Adam Smith argued, facilitates invention by observers of the...

Some firms say they care about the happiness and ‘well-being’ of their employees. But are such claims hype? Or might they be scientific good sense? This study provides evidence that happiness makes people more productive. First, we examine fundamental real-world shocks (bereavement and...

In this paper we investigate whether or not recent initiatives taken by governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of SubjectiveWell Being (SWB) to inform policy makers go in the same direction as citizens expectations on what policy makers should do. We test...

In an incentivized experiment we identify a powerful and ubiquitous bias: individuals regard their own characteristics and choices as more common than is the case. We establish this \false consensus" bias in terms of happiness, political stance, mobile phone brand and on the attitude to...

We show that personality traits mediate the effect of income on Life Satisfaction. The effect is strong in the case of Neuroticism, which measures the sensitivity to threat and punishment, in both the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socioeconomic Panel. Neuroticism increases the...