OECD: One or Many? Ranking Countries with a Composite Well-Being Indicator

In the social sciences it is hardly contested that “institutions matter”. Consequently the analysis of differences and similarities of institutions should be a routine task. Prevailing methods to the measurement of institutions are however problematic, in particular when they have to deal with different levels of measurement. To overcome this, in this paper we present an innovative method to the quantification of qualitative institutional data. We do this by, first, developing benchmarks for comparison based on Weberian ideal types. Then we identify and operationalise the dimensions and indicators to a nuanced measurement of institutions, after which we apply a careful and differentiated scoring, weighting and aggregation procedure in order to guarantee the highest standards of comparability, transparency and reliability of the method. Finally, we demonstrate our method by applying it to the analysis of institutional individualisation in European welfare institutions.     

Asylum Migration in OECD Countries: In Search of Lost Well-Being

Social Indicators Research - Alongside the economic determinants and unobserved structural forces that drive migration flows, asylum migration faces additional natural and man-made hazards, which...     

Building Weighted-Domain Composite Indices of Life Satisfaction with Data Envelopment Analysis

The specialised literature has frequently addressed the relationship between life domains and people’s satisfaction with life. Some researchers have posed questions regarding the importance of domains, therefore interpreting them as weightings and creating domain satisfaction indices. This paper illustrates how Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques can be employed to compute domain-based composite indices of life satisfaction and weightings for life domains. Furthermore, an empirical application is performed on a sample of 178 people living in a rural community in Yucatan (Mexico). One of the main features of the aforementioned techniques is that weightings might differ from one individual to another. Accordingly, several weighting schemes are used to compute different life satisfaction indices, in addition to a constant equally-weighted index. Based on the goodness-of-fit criteria commonly used in this literature, our main result is that DEA-MCDM indicators of life satisfaction do not improve the relationship with self-reported life satisfaction in comparison to the equally-weighted index.