|
on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Oparina, Ekaterina (London School of Economics); Clark, Andrew (Paris School of Economics); Layard, Richard (London School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries from 2009-2019 at both the individual and country levels to revisit the relationship between income and subjective wellbeing. Our inspiration is the paradox first proposed by Easterlin (1974), where higher incomes are associated with greater happiness in cross-sections, yet rising country GDP per head does not necessarily increase its average wellbeing. In our analysis subjective wellbeing (or happiness) is measured by the Cantril ladder on a 0-10 scale. Across individuals, other things equal, one unit of log income raises subjective wellbeing by 0.4 points. In other words, doubling income raises wellbeing by 0.3 points out of 10. Across countries, a crude regression of wellbeing on log per capita income gives a higher coefficient of 0.6. But, once social variables like health and social support are introduced, the picture changes. In rich countries, income no longer has a significant independent effect, either in country cross-sections or in time series. For low-income countries the result is also clear cut – income raises happiness in both cross-section and time series, whether the social variables are controlled for or not. For middle-income countries the result is mixed. |
| Keywords: | subjective wellbeing, income, GDP, Easterlin Paradox, public goods |
| JEL: | E01 H24 H41 I14 I31 O10 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18662 |
| By: | Bhalotra, Sonia (University of Warwick); Daysal, N.Meltem (University of Copenhagen); Jensen, Mathias Fjællegaard (University of Oxford); Jørgensen, Thomas H. (University of Copenhagen); Montpetit, Sébastien (University of Warwick) |
| Abstract: | Using four decades of Danish administrative data, we estimate the intergenerational trans mission of violent crime victimization. Sons are twice as likely, and daughters three times as likely, to be victimized if a parent was victimized, with stronger associations if the mother was the victim. Controlling for cohort, municipality, socioeconomic factors, parental cohabitation, and parental offending explains about 60% of this correlation. The link is weaker in higher-income families; it persists for sons, but is driven to zero for daughters. Further, children of victimized parents experience lower absolute income mobility, comparable to the Black-White difference for men in the United States. |
| Keywords: | victimization, violent crime, intergenerational transmission, income mobility JEL Classification: K42, J12, J62 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:806 |
| By: | Leroux, Marie-Louise; Pestieau, Pierre; Ponthiere, Gregory |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the design of optimal family policies when chil- dren have unequal needs (in terms of material goods and parental time), leading to heterogeneous preferences, and have parents with unequal de- grees of altruism. We examine the issue of interpersonal well-being com- parisons between children by means of consumption-equivalent and time- equivalent indexes, and show that the conditions of existence of these equivalents - as well as their rankings across children - differ across the metric used. We also examine well-being comparisons across parents who differ in their children's preferences and in their altruism. Then, we de- rive the constrained egalitarian social optimum (where only children's well-being levels are equalized) and the double egalitarian social optimum (where both children's and parents'well-being are equalized). It is shown that the optimal allocation and the optimal family policy vary with the metric used for the measurement of children's well-being. |
| Keywords: | childhood, well-being, heterogeneity, interpersonal comparisons, family policies |
| JEL: | D13 I31 I38 H31 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1763 |
| By: | Julie Pernaudet; John List; Arnoldo Müller-Molina; Majid Ahmadi; Imrul Huda; Ajay Sailopal; Dana Suskind |
| Abstract: | Parents play a critical role in shaping children's skills during the first years of life. Yet, identifying the contributors to richer learning environments remains difficult due to various unobservable factors. In this paper, we combine field experiments with AI to explore new acoustic features of parental speech. Specifically, we develop a signal processing model that uses more than 600 hours of recorded parent-child interactions combined with assessment data from two home-visiting experiments conducted in the Chicagoland area to identify features of parental speech that map into children's skills. Our two experiments consist of the same intervention helping parents provide nurturing interactions to their child. We exploit the experimental and natural variation in our data to explore two causal channels and one potential moderator. First, our intervention improves parental speech consistently across the two studies, as measured by acoustic features that are predictive of higher socioemotional skills and adult-child conversational turns. Further, we find that it also increases children's language skills in both experiments, as well as socioemotional skills in the second experiment. Interestingly, our heterogeneity analyses reveal that some of the interventions' impacts vary by socioeconomic groups, with patterns across the two experiments suggesting that the mechanisms are context-dependent. |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feb:framed:00836 |
| By: | Richard Layard; Ekaterina Oparina |
| Abstract: | Optimal public policy requires a social welfare function defined over individual utilities. While there is substantial research on income-based social welfare functions, no published study has directly elicited public preferences over utility when measured by subjective wellbeing. Using a novel survey instrument with a representative UK sample (N=2, 068), we estimate the public's social welfare function for life satisfaction. We find significant aversion to wellbeing inequality, with a median isoelastic parameter of 0.48. This implies a social welfare function approximately equal to the sum of square roots of individual utilities. The median respondent values improving the wellbeing of the least satisfied by one unit roughly twice as much as improving the most satisfied by one unit. Our findings provide ethically grounded distributional weights for wellbeing policy evaluation and cost-benefit analysis. |
| Keywords: | social welfare function, inequality aversion, wellbeing, life satisfaction, distributional weights |
| Date: | 2026–06–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2190 |