Happiness is generally considered to be an ultimate goal in life; virtually everybody wants to be happy. The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 takes it as a self-evident truth that the “pursuit of happiness” is an “unalienable right”, comparable to life and liberty. It follows that economics is – or should be – about individual happiness. In particular, the question is how do economic growth, unemployment and inflation, as well as institutional factors such as good governance, affect individual well-being? In addition to this intrinsic interest, there are three major reasons for economists to consider happiness. The first is economic policy. At the micro-level, it is often impossible to make a Pareto-optimal proposal, because a social action entails costs for some individuals. Hence an evaluation of the net effects, in terms of individual utilities, is needed. On an aggregate level, economic policy must deal with trade-offs, especially those between unemployment and

We search for the circumstances in which the response of national saving to fiscal policy contradicts conventional Keynesian predictions, using data from 18 OECD countries. The data suggest that non-Keynesian effects are associated with large and persistent fiscal impulses. Such responses can be traced to changes in taxes and transfers, more than to changes in government consumption, and are stronger for fiscal contractions than expansions. During large contractions an increase in taxes has no effect on national saving. High or rapidly growing public debt is not a good predictor of non-Keynesian effects. Finally, the composition of the fiscal impulse matters: the non-Keynesian effects of a large fiscal contraction are enhanced when this is carried out primarily by raising taxes.

Previous research on dynamic panel estimation has focused on panels that, unlike a typical panel of macroeconomic data, have small time dimensions and large individual dimensions. We use a Monte Carlo approach to investigate the performance of several different methods designed to reduce the bias of the estimated coefficients for the longer, narrower panels commonly found for macro data. We find that the bias of the least squares dummy variable approach can be significant, even when the time dimension of the panel is as large as 30. For panels with small time dimensions, we find a corrected least squares dummy variable estimator to be the best choice. However, as the time dimension of the panel increases, the computationally simpler Anderson-Hsiao estimator performs equally well. We apply our recommendations to a panel of countries to show that increases in income growth precede increases in savings rates and increases in savings rates precede declines in income growth. JEL Codes: C23,...

The textbook neoclassical growth model predicts that countries with faster productivity growth should invest more and attract more foreign capital. We show that the allocation of capital flows across developing countries is the opposite of this prediction: capital seems to flow more to countries that invest and grow less. We then introduce wedges into the neoclassical growth model and find that one needs a saving wedge in order to explain the correlation between growth and capital flows observed in the data. We conclude with a discussion of some possible avenues for research to resolve the contradiction between the model predictions and the data.

This paper shows that standard empirical methods for estimating log-linearized consumption Euler equations cannot successfully uncover structural parameters like the coe#cient of relative risk aversion from a dataset of simulated consumers behaving exactly according to the standard model. Furthermore, consumption growth for the simulated consumers is very highly statistically related to predictable income growth -- and thus standard `excess sensitivity' tests would reject the hypothesis that consumers are behaving according to the standard model. Results are not much better for the second-order approximation to the Euler equation. The paper concludes that empirical estimation of consumption Euler equations should be abandoned, and discusses some alternative empirical strategies that are not subject to the problems of Euler equation estimation. Keywords: Euler equation, uncertainty, consumption, excess sensitivity JEL Classification Codes: C6, D91, E21 + Department of Economics, John...

This paper is an empirical study of partial hedonic adaptation. It provides longitudinal evidence that people who become disabled go on to exhibit considerable recovery in mental well-being. In fixed-effects equations we estimate the degree of hedonic adaptation at-- depending on the severity of the disability-- approximately 30 % to 50%. Our calculations should be viewed as illustrative; more research, on other data sets, is needed. Nevertheless, we discuss potential implications of our results for economists and the courts.

Meghir, Klaus Schimdt-Hebbel, Luis Serven and Farshid Vahid for useful comments. This paper was first

This paper provides derivations necessary for solving an optimal consumption problem with multiplicative habits and a CRRA ‘outer ’ utility function, either for a microeconomic problem with both labor income risk and rate-of-return risk, or for a macroeconomic representative agent model. Keywords: agent habit formation, relative consumption, economic growth, representative

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The 1991 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth contains detailed information on how respondents acquired their main residence and any other real estate. This information is used to estimate the impact of inter vivos transfers on the saving period required to purchase a house and on the value of the house purchased when households have limited access to mortgage markets. It is found that transfers shorten the saving time by about two years and allow households to purchase considerably larger homes. The results have implications for the debate about the source of the relation between aggregate saving and growth. Keywords: intergenerational transfers, homeownership, borrowing constraints JEL Classification: D91, R21 We thank Richard Blundell, Chris Carroll, and John Flemming for helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper. Financial support was provided by the Training and Mobility of Researchers Network Program (TMR) of the European Commission DGXII, the Italian Nationa...