Population, population density and technological change

In a model on population and endogenous technological change, Kremer (1993) combines a short-run Malthusian scenario where income determines the population that can be sustained, with the Boserupian insight that greater population spurs technological change and can therefore lift a country out of its Malthusian trap. We show that a more realistic version of the model, which combines population and population density, allows deeper insights into these processes. The incorporation of population density also allows a superior interpretation of the empirical regularities between the level of population, population density, population growth, and economic development at aggregated and disaggregated levels.

Social time preference revisited

The article reconsiders the implications of the choice of pure social time preference for intergenerational equity in the presence of a time-consistent utilitarian social welfare criterion. The analytic framework is a setting with overlapping generations, lifetime uncertainty, population growth and technical progress. The analysis identifies upper and lower bounds for the feasible range of social discount rates and draws a corresponding distinction between “gerontocratic” and “Stalinist” optimal plans. The paper corrects a number of inaccurate propositions in a related earlier contribution by Marini and Scaramozzino (2000) to this journal.

Environmentally Responsible Happy Nation Index: Towards an Internationally Acceptable National Success Indicator

Amidst increasing attention to happiness studies by economists, the New Economics Foundation launched in July 2006 the Happy Planet Index (Marks et al. 2006). This is the ratio of the average happy life years (HLY) to the per capita ecological footprint of the country concerned. HLY is in turn the product of the average happiness (or life satisfaction) index and the life expectancy index. Some essential revisions to this index are proposed to reach an internationally acceptable national success indicator that aims positively at long and happy lives but negatively at the external costs of environmental disruption. Hopefully, this ‘environmentally responsible happy nation index’ will lead to some re-orientation of both the market and national governments towards something more fundamentally valuable.

Birth and Fortune Revisited: A Cohort Analysis of Underemployment, 1974–2004

The cohort is a key concept in the study of social demography and social change. The enduring influence of cohort membership can arise from history-based and/or size-based effects. The most prominent proponent of size-based cohort effects is Easterlin (Birth and fortune: The impact of numbers on personal welfare, 1980) who argues that individuals hailing from unusually large cohorts will experience adverse labor market conditions relative to the members of the smaller cohorts that bracket them. Drawing on data from the March Current Population Survey for the period spanning 1974–2004, we examine the influence of relative cohort size on underemployment. The results provide modest support for the Easterlin thesis, showing the odds of underemployment to be greatest among members of relatively large cohorts, net of other significant predictors. The results also show that the impact of relative cohort size differs by educational level, suggesting that adverse economic conditions produced by large cohort size can be offset by broader changes in the labor market and other social institutions.

A longitudinal analysis of the impact of health shocks on the wealth of elders

We investigate the impact of health shocks on wealth, using all four waves of the Health and Retirement Study, and estimate not only the short-term effect but also the long-term effect of health shocks on wealth of the elderly. We find that new health events lower wealth in elders during the period in which such health shocks occur, but the impact tends to disappear over time. We also find that health shocks result in greater wealth depletion when they occur later in life. Together with existing health problems, the overall impact of health problems on wealth increases over time.

Asymmetric social protection systems with migration

We study the consequences of the coexistence of different social protection systems on contribution rate levels and migration in a two-country model. Before any migration takes place, the levels of contribution rates are chosen by a representative elected in each country. The migration of each agent depends on her anticipation of other agents’ migrations. We show that the richest agents are attracted to the Bismarckian country. The poorest agents tend to migrate toward one country or the other depending on the Beveridgean country contribution rate. The Beveridgean country can set a higher contribution rate to limit the departures of rich agents.

Colourism and African–american wealth: evidence from the nineteenth-century south

Black is not always black. Subtle distinctions in skin tone translate into significant differences in outcomes. Data on more than 15,000 households interviewed during the 1860 US federal census exhibit sharp differences in wealth holdings between white, mulatto, and black households in the urban South. We document these differences, investigate relationships between wealth and recorded household characteristics, and decompose the wealth gaps to examine the returns to racial characteristics. The analysis reveals a distinct racial hierarchy. Black wealth was only 20% of white wealth, but mulattoes held nearly 50% of whites’ wealth. This advantage is consistent with colourism, the favouritism shown to those of lighter complexion.

Levels of Mental Health Continuum and Personality Traits

Empirically, mental health and mental illness are not opposite ends of a single measurement continuum. In view of this fact, Keyes (J Health Soc Behav, 43:207–202, 2002) operationalizes mental health as a syndrome of symptoms of both positive feelings (emotional well-being) and positive functioning (psychological and social well-being) in life. In his comprehensive model, the presence of mental health is described as flourishing in life, and the absence of mental health is characterized as languishing in life. The aim of this study was to investigate the discriminatory power of Big Five personality traits in discriminating among the levels of mental health continuum using an Iranian university student sample. Findings revealed that respondents with different levels of mental health differed significantly on four of the five personality traits (extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness). All in all, the results of this study converged with prior findings about the importance of Big Five personality traits in predicting well-being.

Strategic altruistic transfers and rent seeking within the family

This paper examines the rent-seeking behavior of “selfish” children in competing for parental transfers. The paper extends Chang and Weisman (South Econ J 71:821–836, 2005), that focuses on compensated transfers, to allow for non-compensated transfers à la Buchanan (J Law Econ 26:71–85, 1983) and derives results for the case in which children’s time contributions as perceived by their parents are a merit good (e.g., service), pure waste (e.g., bugging), or a mix of both. For an increase in the proportion of time contributions that are pure waste, parents find it optimal to reduce the size of an overall transfer, thereby lowering the levels of wasteful rent-seeking activities by their children within the family.

The educational attainment of second-generation mainland Chinese immigrants in Taiwan

The social status and well-being of political immigrants’ children are seldom touched upon in literature. This paper focuses on the impact of refugee experience on the relative educational attainment of second-generation immigrants in Taiwan. In contrast with the results in van Ours and Veenman (J Popul Econ 16(4):739–753, 2003) and Riphahn (J Popul Econ 16(4):711–737, 2003) who showed that second-generation immigrants lag behind their native counterparts, this paper’s principle finding is that the father’s immigration status can help his children achieve a higher educational qualification than native Taiwanese after controlling the relevant determinants of educational attainment, including parental background and the neighborhood where the interviewee grows up. In addition, women born in the earlier cohort benefit more by their fathers’ immigration status than their male counterparts do. However, Taiwanese schooling advances across generations are impressive, whereby the gap in schooling attainment between second-generation immigrants and native Taiwanese is found to decline over time.

Population dynamics and monetary policy

This paper shows that in a general equilibrium model with interest-rate feedback rules of the Taylor-type population dynamics give rise to multiple steady states. Under an active monetary policy, real determinacy occurs only around the steady state with zero net financial wealth, where aggregate consumption is equally distributed among agents of different generations. By contrast, in a neighborhood of the steady state displaying a positive stock of financial wealth and intergenerational inequality, real determinacy requires monetary policy to be passive. Changes in the demographic profile of the economy are shown to have relevant implications for the aggregate accumulation of wealth.

Avowed Happiness in Confucian Asia: Ascertaining its Distribution,Patterns, and Sources

This study reviewed three philosophical accounts of happiness, and then tested those accounts with the Asiabarometer surveys conducted in six Confucian societies during the summer of 2006. Statistical analyses of these surveys reveal that East Asians tend to experience happiness to a greater extent when they experience enjoyment together with achievement and/or satisfaction. The preponderance of such multi-dimensional conceptions in all those societies poses a direct challenge to a single dimensional account of happiness in the West. The analyses also reveal that positive assessments of interpersonal relationships matter more than the amount of knowledge or wealth in living a happy life in Confucian societies.

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Changes in HIV/AIDS knowledge and testing behavior in Africa: how much and for whom?

Demographic and Health Survey data from nine African countries make it clear that HIV/AIDS prevention knowledge has been increasing. Still, in many cases, fewer than half of adult respondents can identify specific prevention behaviors. Knowledge is lowest in rural areas and among women. HIV testing generally remains rare but is highly variable across countries, likely reflecting differences in the supply of testing services. In most cases, schooling and wealth impacts on prevention knowledge have either been stable or have increased; hence, in the majority of contexts, initial disparities in knowledge by education and wealth levels have persisted or widened.

Money Does not Buy Happiness: Or Does It? A Reassessment Based on the Combined Effects of Wealth,Income and Consumption

The paper uses household economic panel data from five countries—Australia, Britain, Germany, Hungary and The Netherlands—to provide a reassessment of the impact of economic well-being on happiness. The main conclusion is that happiness is considerably more affected by economic circumstances than previously believed. In all five countries wealth affects life satisfaction more than income. In the countries for which consumption data are available (Britain and Hungary), non-durable consumption expenditures also prove at least as important to happiness as income.

Cross-cultural measurement equivalence of generalized trust. Evidence from the European Social Survey (2002 and 2004)

Generalized trust features as the most prominent attitudinal element of social capital, and as such the concept is widely used in comparative research. In this article we investigate the cross-cultural equivalence of the three-item scale on generalized trust that is included in the European Social Survey 2002 and 2004 waves. The use of metric equivalence tests demonstrates that these tree items can be considered as a reliable and cross-culturally valid concept. If we apply the stricter scalar equivalence test, however, the result is that the scale is not sufficiently equivalent across European societies, with especially the item on expecting help from others showing major problems in a number of countries. We close this article by offering some suggestions on how the generalized trust scale might be used in a (sufficiently) reliable manner in cross-cultural research across Europe.

The relevance of social interactions on housing satisfaction

For most individuals, housing is the largest consumption and investment item of their lifetime and, as a result, housing satisfaction is an important component of their quality of life. The purpose of this paper then is to investigate the determinants of individual housing satisfaction as a particular domain of satisfaction with life as a whole, examining the effects of individual and household attributes (predictive), housing characteristics (hedonic), and more importantly, of social interactions originated in one's residential neighbourhood. To do so, we model housing as a composite commodity that satisfies dwelling needs, as well as other intangibles such as familiar relationships and socio-status aspects. We use the Survey of Living Conditions and Poverty (Spain). Specifically, using a self-reported measure of housing satisfaction, we estimate ordered probit models searching for the empirical specification that provides the best fit accounting for divergences driven by aspirations defined in the own household (internal norm), and by social comparisons (peer-effect or external norm).

Explaining Cross-Country Differences in Attitudes Towards Immigration in the EU-15

In this paper, we use data from the first two rounds of the European Social Survey to analyze the extent to which differences in average attitudes towards immigration across the EU-15 countries may be explained by differences in socioeconomic characteristics and individually perceived consequences of immigration, using an extension of a decomposition technique developed by Fairlie (2005). We find that despite the significant effects of socioeconomic characteristics on attitudes, differences in the distributions of these characteristics can only explain a modest share of the cross-country variation in average attitudes. A larger part can be explained by differences in perceived consequences of immigration, but the main part is still left unexplained. Apart from providing useful input for policy makers working in the area of immigration policy, this raises a number of questions for further research for which the ESS data can be successfully applied.

Poverty Is Low Consumption and Low Wealth,Not Just Low Income

The purpose of this paper is to suggest an improved measure of financial poverty, based on household consumption and wealth as well as income. Data come from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) Survey, which appears to be the first national socio-economic panel survey to provide longitudinal data on all three measures of household economic well-being. National measures of poverty in Australia and other Western countries are usually based only on low income. But this is conceptually incorrect; the measures lack validity. To be poor is to have a low material standard of living—involuntarily. So measures of poverty should also take account of household consumption and wealth. If a household has an adequate current level of consumption, it should not be classified as poor right now, even if its current income is low. Similarly, if it has substantial wealth (net worth), it should not be viewed as poor because it could draw down on wealth to boost current consumption. The invalidity of income-based measures has long been recognised in principle (Ringen 1987, The possibility of politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press). In practical terms, the problem is to combine measures of wealth and income, and especially consumption, in the same survey. In the 2005 HILDA Survey a battery of household expenditure items was included which, benchmarked against the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Household Expenditure Survey for 2003–04, appeared to provide valid measurement of 53.4% of total household expenditure. These well measured items correlated 0.76 with total expenditure and, in combination with standard demographic variables, accounted for 78.3% of the variance in the total. This paper uses 2005–06 HILDA data to construct revised measures of financial poverty. The value of these measures for public policy and research purposes is illustrated. In particular, the new measures give much lower estimates of poverty than income-based measures. They can also be used to predict which households are at risk of future poverty.

“Backslanted X” fertility dynamics and macroeconomics

A large number of pairs of countries exhibit a dynamic pattern in which: (1) Fertility in both countries declines across time; (2) initially, one country has a higher fertility and a lower per-capita income than the other; and (3) in time, as per-capita incomes converge, fertility rates in the poorer country become lower than in the richer one. This article documents the prevalence of such dynamics and offers a theoretical model in which these dynamics emerge endogenously. Assuming differences in the degree of utility substitution between consumption and rearing children across countries generates all three components of these dynamics.

A Discrepancy Index for the Study of Participation with an Application to the Case of Higher Education in Italy

This article proposes and applies a simple method to measure the distance from a situation of uniform participation. First, a discrepancy index based on the use of generalized Lorenz curves is presented. This index can be expressed in terms of means and Gini indices of relevant characteristics in the populations of participants and that of a control group. A multivariate extension is also illustrated. The discrepancy index is then used to analyse access into higher education in Italy during the nineties. Discrepancy between participants and non-participants is especially high in terms of parents’ wealth and education, less in terms of income. Also, discrepancy is higher during recessions. Multivariate analysis reveals that “cultural constrains” are more important than financial constraints. Hence, efforts to equalize opportunity for access into higher education should be as much focussed on motivation and social background as they are on financial constraints.