Corrupción y actividad económica: una visión panorámica

Junto a los desarrollos teóricos que tratan de comprender las causas de la corrupción, por qué ésta tiende a presentar un alto grado de persistencia, o cuáles son los efectos sociales, políticos o macroeconómicos de la corrupción, en la última década ha aparecido una gran cantidad de trabajos empíricos que estudian la relación entre la corrupción y distintas variables económicas. El objetivo de este trabajo es ofrecer una revisión sintética de esta literatura, discutiendo los principales planteamientos teóricos y los resultados empíricos obtenidos en relación tanto con los factores determinantes de la corrupción como con las consecuencias económicas que se derivan de la misma. Palabras clave: Corrupción, gobierno, actuación pública. Clasificación JEL: D73, E62, H11.

Assessing the level of happiness across countries: A robust frontier approach

In this paper we propose an innovative approach based on life satisfaction to estimate efficiency measures for individuals considering how they convert their resources into higher levels of happiness. We use an extension of the conditional nonparametric robust approach which allows us to consider a mixed set of individual and institutional variables that can affect the levels of life satisfaction. Our empirical analysis includes data about 31,854 individuals from 26 OECD countries participating in the last wave of the World Values Survey. Results obtained indicate that the most efficient individuals in achieving happiness tend to live in northern and central European countries whereas the less efficient individuals are found, in average, in Asian transitional economies. In addition, it is also found that most of the traditional determinants of wellbeing (e.g. age, marital status, religion or unemployment) also have a significant impact on efficiency measures

Assessing the level of happiness across countries: A robust frontier approach

In this paper we propose an innovative approach based on life satisfaction to estimate efficiency measures for individuals considering how they convert their resources into higher levels of happiness. We use an extension of the conditional nonparametric robust approach which allows us to consider a mixed set of individual and institutional variables that can affect the levels of life satisfaction. Our empirical analysis includes data about 31,854 individuals from 26 OECD countries participating in the last wave of the World Values Survey. Results obtained indicate that the most efficient individuals in achieving happiness tend to live in northern and central European countries whereas the less efficient individuals are found, in average, in Asian transitional economies. In addition, it is also found that most of the traditional determinants of wellbeing (e.g. age, marital status, religion or unemployment) also have a significant impact on efficiency measures

Labour Productivity Growth and Convergence in the EU: The Role of Physical and Human Capital Accumulation.

The aim of this article is to analyse labour productivity growth and convergence in the EU-15 countries between 1980 and 1997. Adopting a production frontier approach, labour productivity growth is broken down into components attributable to efficiency change, technological progress and capital accumulation. Furthermore, in the spirit of the Quah´s approach, the dynamics of the distribution of labour productivity is also analysed. Our results show that physical and human capital accumulation appears to be the main force driving the labour productivity growth and convergence processes experienced by the European economies during these years. On the other hand, we observe that some problems appear in the EU-15 in terms of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth.

Education as a Positional Good: A Life Satisfaction Approach

Life satisfaction, Education, Positional goods,