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The well-known Easterlin paradox points out that average happiness has remained constant over time despite sharp rises in GNP per head. At the same time, a micro literature has typically found positive correlations between individual income and individual measures of subjective well-being. This paper suggests that these two findings are consistent with the presence of relative income terms in the utility function. Income may be evaluated relative to others (social comparison) or to oneself in the past (habituation). We review the evidence on relative income from the subjective well-being literature. We also discuss the relation (or not) between happiness and utility and discuss some non-happiness research (behavioural, experimental, neurological) dealing with income comparisons. We last consider how relative income in the utility function affects economic models of behaviour in a number of different domains.

This paper examines the relationship between early childbearing and child mortality in Bangladesh, a country where adolescent childbearing is of particular concern. We argue that effective use of specific health inputs could however significantly lower child mortality rates even among adolescent women. This offers an attractive policy option particularly when compared to the costly alternative of delaying age at marriage. In particular, we find that women having early childbirth tend to use health inputs differently from all other women. After correcting for this possible selectivity bias, the adverse effects of early childbirth on child mortality are reversed. The favourable effects of use of health inputs however continue remain statistically significant.

Political corruption is a concern of many modern democracies. It weakens democratic institutions, restricts public services, and lowers productivity undermining economic development. Yet despite its importance, our understanding of what determines corruption is limited. This paper uses a novel dataset of political corruption in local governments, constructed from reports of an anti-corruption program in Brazil, to test whether the possibility of re-election affects the level of rents extracted by incumbent politicians. Exploiting variation induced by the existence of a term limit, we find that in municipalities where mayors are in their final term, there is significantly more corruption compared to similar municipalities where mayors can still be re-elected. In particular, the share of resources misappropriated is, on average, 57 percent larger in municipalities with lame-duck mayors. The findings suggest that electoral rules that enhance political accountability play a crucial role in constraining politician's corrupt behavior.

We combine household survey data with event data on the timing and location of armed conflicts to examine the impact of Burundi's civil war on children's health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the war's timing across provinces and the exposure of children's birth cohorts to the fighting. After controlling for province of residence, birth cohort, individual and household characteristics, and province-specific time trends, we find that children exposed to the war have on average 0.515 standard deviations lower height-for-age z-scores than non-exposed children. This negative effect is robust to specifications exploiting alternative sources of exogenous variation.

We empirically model performance in the final round of a multiple-round tournament as a spatially autoregressive process, allowing us to sign and quantify the endogenous interactions between competitors. Doing so speaks to significant regularities in the data that suggest that a player's own performance generally tends to improve with the improving performance of competitors. However, we also find significant asymmetries in the interdependency of player performance that suggest that social interactions, even those found in a fairly straightforward game, can be rather complex. For example, while the positive complementarity in performance is particularly strong between tied players, own performance suffers in response to improving performance of lagging, lower-ability competitors.

There are severe inequalities in health in the world, poor health being concentrated amongst poor people in poor countries. Poor countries spend a much smaller share of national income on health expenditure than do richer countries. What potential lies in political or growth processes that raise this share? This depends upon how effective government health spending in developing countries is. Existing research presents little evidence of an impact on childhood mortality. Using specifications similar to those in the existing literature, this paper finds a similar result for India, which is that state health spending saves no lives. However, upon allowing lagged effects, controlling in a flexible way for trended unobservables and restricting the sample to rural households, a significant effect of health expenditure on infant mortality emerges, the long run elasticity being about -0.24. There are striking differences in the impact by social group. Slicing the data by gender, birth-order, religion, maternal and paternal education and maternal age at birth, I find the weakest effects in the most vulnerable groups (with the exception of a large effect for scheduled tribes).

Hauptbeschreibung: Es steht außer Frage, daß das Werk Immanuel Kants Dreh- und Angelpunkt war für die Ausbildung der Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus: In kritischer Anknüpfung an seine Neubestimmung der Aufgabe einer systematisch ausgerichteten Philosophie entwarf zunächst Fichte sein Konzept einer transzendentalphilosophisch begründeten Wissenschaftslehre, und gelangten dann Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel zu den Einsichten, mit denen sie die kritischen Forderungen des großen Königsberger Philosophen einlösen wollten.Nach dem ersten Band der Reihe 'System der Vernunft - Kant und der deutsche

Hauptbeschreibung: Die Bedeutung der Ästhetik für die Symbolphilosophie Ernst Cassirers ist kaum zu überschätzen. Indem Cassirer den Ort der symbolischen Formung in die Wahrnehmung verlegt, avanciert sie zur prima philosophia. Dennoch gehören Ästhetik und Kunstphilosophie zu den vernachlässigten Problemkomplexen der Cassirerforschung. Die Studie »Ästhetik im Zeichen des Menschen« schließt diese Lücke, indem sie die ästhetische Vorgeschichte der Philosophie der symbolischen Formen rekonstruiert und die Möglichkeit, Kunst als symbolische Form zu begreifen, diskutiert. Sie versucht zu zeigen, daß C

Nach den großen Unternehmensskandalen ist heute verantwortungsvolles unternehmerisches Handeln ein Entscheidungskriterium für Anleger, Kunden und Bewerber. So praktizieren z.B. rund ein Drittel aller Mittelständler in Deutschland bereits "Corporate Social Responsibility". Integres Handeln wird immer stärker zum Schlüsselfaktor für gute Unternehmensführung. 15 flexibel kombinierbare Module Inhaltsverzeichnis Überzeugen Sie sich selbst vollumfänglich von den Inhalten des Angebots.

Created in 1966 in California, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love had a membership of 750 and was held responsible for widely distributing LSD in the US. The police described it as a "hippie mafia" and the counter-culture talked softly of a secretive, mystical band whose motives were idealistic. Eventually, The Brotherhood came to symbolize the rise of LSD,the growth of the psychedelic movement and the heady, optimistic, revolutionary, energized days of the 1960s

We estimate the effects of hiring subsidies for older workers on transitions from unemployment to employment in Germany. Using a natural experiment, our first set of estimates is based on a legal change extending the group of eligible unemployed persons. A subsequent legal change in the opposite direction is used to validate these results. Our data cover the population of unemployed jobseekers in Germany and was specifically made available for our purposes from administrative data. Consistent support for an employment effect of hiring subsidies can only be found for women in East Germany. Concerning other population groups, firms ́hiring behavior is hardly influenced by the program and hiring subsidies mainly lead to deadweight effects.