Happiness and the Human Development Index : the paradox of Australia

According to the well-being measure known as the U.N. Human Development Index, Australia now ranks 3rd in the world and higher than all other English-speaking nations. This paper questions that assessment. It reviews work on the economics of happiness, considers implications for policymakers, and explores where Australia lies in international subjective well-being rankings. Using new data on approximately 50,000 randomly sampled individuals from 35 nations, the paper shows that Australians have some of the lowest levels of job satisfaction in the world. Moreover, among the sub-sample of English-speaking nations, where a common language should help subjective measures to be reliable, Australia performs poorly on a range of happiness indicators. The paper discusses this paradox. Our purpose is not to reject HDI methods, but rather to argue that much remains to be understood in this area

On the monotone stability approach to BSDEs with jumps: Extensions, concrete criteria and examples

We show a concise extension of the monotone stability approach to backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) that are jointly driven by a Brownian motion and a random measure for jumps, which could be of infinite activity with a non-deterministic and time inhomogeneous compensator. The BSDE generator function can be non convex and needs not to satisfy global Lipschitz conditions in the jump integrand. We contribute concrete criteria, that are easy to verify, for results on existence and uniqueness of bounded solutions to BSDEs with jumps, and on comparison and a-priori $L^{\infty}$-bounds. Several examples and counter examples are discussed to shed light on the scope and applicability of different assumptions, and we provide an overview of major applications in finance and optimal control.Comment: 28 pages. Added DOI https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-22285-7_1 for final publication, corrected typo (missing gamma) in example 4.1

Nominal or Real? The Impact of Regional Price Levels on Satisfaction with Life

According to economic theory, real income, i.e., nominal income adjusted for purchasing power, should be the relevant source of life satisfaction. Previous work, however, has only studied the impact of inflation adjusted nominal income and not taken into account regional differences in purchasing power. Therefore, we use a novel data set to study how regional price levels affect satisfaction with life. The data set comprises about 7 million data points that are used to construct a price level for each of the 428 administrative districts in Germany. We estimate pooled OLS and ordered probit models that include a comprehensive set of individual level, time-varying and time-invariant control variables as well as control variables that capture district heterogeneity other than the price level. Our results show that higher price levels significantly reduce life satisfaction. Furthermore, we find that a higher price level tends to induce a larger loss in life satisfaction than a corresponding decrease in nominal income. A formal test of neutrality of money, however, does not reject neutrality of money. Our results provide an argument in favor of regional indexation of government transfer payments such as social welfare benefits

Life satisfaction and confidence in national institutions: evidence from South America

A number of South American countries experienced turbulent democratic, political and economic upheaval over the last 40 years in the form of coup d’états in the 1970s, tumultuous elections, and repeated severe economic crises, some of which happened fairly recently. Starting in 2010, a number of court proceedings across the region have made past military coup d’états the focus of national conversations. South American citizens may, therefore, have lost confidence in national institutions that have repeatedly disappointed their trust and expectations; a situation with potentially detrimental effects on their well-being. Using eight waves of the Gallup World Poll collected between 2009 and 2016 across ten South American countries, we investigate to what extent people’s confidence in financial institutions, the honesty of elections, the military, the judicial system, the national government and the police is associated with people’s current and expectation of future life satisfaction. We find that people who report confidence in these six institutions rate their current and expected life satisfaction, on average, to be higher than those who lack these types of institutional confidence, even after controlling for demographic factors and macroeconomic indicators. In addition, we investigate changes over time for all six measures of confidence in institutions as well as for current and expectation of future life satisfaction. Our results suggest that governments’ investments in well-functioning institutions may contribute positively to subjective well-being in a society. However, our analysis is correlational and we thus cannot rule out reverse causality

From offender to victim-oriented monitoring : a comparative analysis of the emergence of electronic monitoring systems in Argentina and England and Wales

The increasingly psychological terrain of crime and disorder management has had a transformative impact upon the use of electronic monitoring technologies. Surveillance technologies such as electronic monitoring ‑ EM, biometrics, and video surveillance have flourished in commercial environments that market the benefits of asocial technologies in managing disorderly behavior and which, despite often chimerical crime prevention promises, appeal to the ontologically insecure social imagination. The growth of EM in criminal justice has subsequently taken place despite, at best, equivocal evidence that it protects the public and reduces recidivism. Innovative developments in Portugal, Argentina and the United States have re-imagined EM technologies as more personalized devices that can support victims rather than control offenders. These developments represent a re-conceptualization of the use of the technology beyond the neoliberal prism of rational choice theories and offender-oriented thinking that influenced first generation thinking about EM. This paper identifies the socio-political influences that helped conceptualize first generation thinking about EM as, firstly, a community sentence and latterly, as a technique of urban security. The paper reviews attempts to theorize the role and function of EM surveillance technologies within and beyond criminal justice and explores the contribution of victimological perspectives to the use of EM 2.0

Cracking down on bribery

Do crackdowns on bribery impact corrupt behavior in the long run? In this paper we observe the long-run impact of a short-term punishment institution (i.e., a crackdown) on bribery behavior in a lab setting. We conduct lab experiments in two countries with cultures that differ in corruption norms, and which experience very different levels of bribery: the US and Pakistan. Bribery is implemented in the laboratory as a repeated three-player sequential game, consisting of a firm, a government official and a citizen. The design contains three phases: pre-crackdown, crackdown, and post-crackdown. Results show that post-crackdown behavior is not significantly different from pre-crackdown behavior in either country. We conclude that short-term crackdowns may impact behavior in the short run, depending on the strength of the existing corruption norms in the country. More importantly, in our setting crackdowns are completely ineffective in the long run, as corrupt behavior rebounds to pre-crackdown levels

Truncated Power Laws Reveal a Link between Low-Level Behavioral Processes and Grouping Patterns in a Colonial Bird

Background: Departures from power law group size frequency distributions have been proposed as a useful tool to link individual behavior with population patterns and dynamics, although examples are scarce for wild animal populations. Methodology/Principal Findings: We studied a population of Lesser kestrels (Falco naumanni) breeding in groups (colonies) from one to ca. 40 breeding pairs in 10,000 km 2 in NE Spain. A 3.5 fold steady population increase occurred during the eight-year study period, accompanied by a geographical expansion from an initial subpopulation which in turn remained stable in numbers. This population instability was mainly driven by first-breeders, which are less competitive at breeding sites, being relegated to breed solitarily or in small colony sizes, and disperse farther than adults. Colony size frequency distributions shifted from an initial power law to a truncated power law mirroring population increase. Thus, we hypothesized that population instability was behind the truncation of the power law. Accordingly, we found a power law distribution through years in the initial subpopulation, and a match between the power law breakpoint (at ca. ten pairs) and those colony sizes from which the despotic behavior of colony owners started to impair the settlement of newcomers. Moreover, the instability hypothesis was further supported by snapshot data from another population of Lesser kestrels in SW Spain suffering a population decline. Conclusions/Significance: Appropriate analysis of the scaling properties of grouping patterns has unraveled the lin

Happiness, Ideology and Crime in Argentine Cities

This paper uses self-reported data on victimization, subjective well being and ideology for a panel of individuals living in six Argentine cities. While no relationship is found between happiness and victimization experiences, a correlation is documented, however, between victimization experience and changes in ideological positions. Specifically, individuals who are the victims of crime are subsequently more likely than non-victims to state that inequality is high in Argentina and that the appropriate measure to reduce crime is to become less punitive (demanding lower penalties for the same crime)