SOCIAL COMPARISON AND SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING: DOES THE HEALTH OF OTHERS MATTER?

The importance of social comparison in shaping individual utility has been widely documented by subjective well-being literature. So far, income has been the main dimension considered in social comparison. This paper aims to investigate whether subjective well-being is influenced by inter-personal comparison with respect to health. Thus, we study the effects of the health of others and relative health hypothesis on two measures of subjective well-being: happiness and subjective health. Using data from the Italian Health Conditions survey, we show that a high incidence of chronic conditions and disability among reference groups negatively affects both happiness and subjective health. Such effects are stronger among people in the same conditions. These results, robust to different econometric specifications and estimation techniques, suggest the presence of some sympathy in individual preferences with respect to health and reveal that other people?s health status serves as a benchmark to assess one?s own health conditions.health conditions, social comparison, subjective well-being

Proposing Standards for Child Custody: The Proceedings, the Role of the Agency, and the Best Interests of the Child

Article discusses the nature of child custody proceedings, the roles of the court and the parties, and the standards which the courts will apply in determining the custody of the child under the standard of “best interests” of the child. Article proposes that legislature should amend section 614 of the Family Court Act and section 384(b) of the Social Services Law to state clearly whether the “best interest of the child” test has any relevancy at the fact-finding stage, or whether there must be an independent finding at the fact-finding hearing of neglect or fault on the part of the parent before the best interest of the child test is applied at the dispositional hearing

THE EFFECTS OF PEOPLES’ HEIGHT AND RELATIVE HEIGHT ON WELL-BEING

Using a rich Italian survey, we investigate the effect of height on individual happiness. From our analysis it emerges that a large part of the effect of height on well-being is driven by a positive correlation between height and economic and health conditions. However, for young males the effect of height on happiness persists even after controlling for these variables, implying that height may produce some psycho-social direct effects on well-being. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that males care not only about their own height but also about the height of people in their reference group. Well-being is greater for individuals who are taller than other subjects in their reference group. Results are robust to different definitions of reference group and controlling for a number of other reference group characteristics. We speculate that the beneficial effect of height on young males' well-being may be related to the fact that in some countries, such as Italy, and especially for men, height is considered as a proxy for handsomeness.height, social comparison, subjective well-being

Do You Think Your Risk Is Fair Paid? Evidence From Italian Labor Market

Starting from Adam Smith's intuition, compensating wage differentials are one of the most widespread explanation to describe why agents should bear occupational risk of injury and death. For nearly thirty years, economists have attempted to and empirical evidence on such wage differentials mostly relying on estimation of a simple wage equation. This paper claims to put one step forward. Using the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) 2004 we estimate for Italy the wage premium held by workers in risky occupations by means of the matching estimator. Such technique is desirable because it attempts to remove all the differences in wage coming from heterogeneity across individuals and not directly imputable to risk. Estimates suggest that net hourly wage premium is about 3% to manual workers and nearly null to non-manual workers. When we split the sample along the employer size, our findings show a heterogeneous treatment with respect to occupational status. Small firms tend to flatten out any risk premium to manual workers, while they recognize roughly 6% to non-manual workers; the opposite occurs when we look at medium-large firms wherein manual workers gain 1.5% to 5% more with respect their counterparts. Therefore, it seems that wage-risk trade off does not always emerge as hedonic wage theory would predict.wage differentials; risky jobs; value of a statistical life; propensity score matching.

Disclosure Dilemmas: Ethics of Genetic Prognosis after the 'Right to Know/Not to Know' Debate Christoph Rehmann-Sutter & Hansjakob Muller (eds.) Ashgate 2009

This is the final version of the article. Available from Springer Open via the DOI in this record

UCHL1 protein synthesis upon rapamycin treatment involves its antisense RNA trough embedded SINEB2 repeat

The initial description of genomes organization has consisted in the separation between regulatory and protein-coding DNA stretches. This simple and elegant model has supported the \u201cone region-one function\u201d theory: a genome is a linear arrangement of functional elements interspersed with nonfunctional regions. Recently the advances in transcriptomics technologies have shown that a genomic region can be used for different purposes and that functional elements can co-locate in the same region of the genome

Exploring protandry and pupal size selection for Aedes albopictus sex separation

Background: We explored the possibility to improve male/female separation (sexing) in Aedes albopictus by selection of two strains, one toward increasing sex dimorphism and another toward increasing protandry. In the laboratory we selected and crossed small males with large females to exploit dimorphism, and early pupating males with late pupating females to exploit protandry. Results: While selection for enhanced dimorphism was not a profitable character, the selection for enhanced protandry up to F10 produced significant improvement in the time interval between male and female pupation. By collecting the pupae at 24 h from the beginning of pupation, without any sieving operation, we obtained about 28.50% of pupae (calculated in relation to the estimated initial number of first instar larvae used), vs 26.49% we had in the control strain, and, more interestingly, when checking the sex ratio of these pupae we observed a presence of females of 0.92% vs 23.02% in the control strain. We also modified our egg hatching protocol from the previous standard procedure that required keeping the eggs in the glass hatching container overnight (for about 14-16 h) to a new protocol where eggs are kept in the hatching container for 4 h in order to obtain more synchronized larvae. This was possible without any reduction in the egg hatching rate. Conclusions: In Aedes albopictus it is possible to develop hyper-protandric strains useful to produce male pupae without applying other sexing systems. This represents a considerable achievement assisting the Sterile Insect Technique application, allowing improvement of the current sexing method based on mechanical separation. More investigations are under way in order to further enhance the male productivity capacity of the strain and to determine whether the selection has any impact on the male fitness parameters

Awakening the Sleeping Giant? The Euro Crisis and EU Issue Voting in Germany

This article examines the alterations in the forms of electoral contestation that occurred in Germany due to the Euro Crisis. The Great Recession has probably set in motion new windows of opportunity to awake the Sleeping Giant of European integration. Indeed, by increasing their entrepreneurial efforts on the EU issues, the German parties may have rendered this conflict more contentious, changing electoral behavior. To understand the nexus between the Euro Crisis and European integration politicization, this article analyzes the variations of the EU issue entrepreneurship achieved by the German parties between 2010 and 2014. Moreover, this work presents voting models, testing the fluctuations in the levels of EU issue voting. This two-step empirical research seeks to identify whether the Euro Crisis generated new entrepreneurial strategies, realigning the voters along the Pro-/-Anti-European issue dimension in Germany