Who benefits from big government? A life satisfaction approach

Which impact does government size have on life satisfaction, and how do effects of bigger government differ between income groups in society? Previous studies typically employed country averages and thus neglected possibly heterogeneous happiness effects between income groups. This paper addresses empirically the effects of government spending on subjective well-being of individuals belonging to different income groups. Our analysis is based on individual data from 25 European countries participating in the European Social Survey. In contrast to most previous studies we take account of the endogeneity between relative income position and reported life satisfaction by an instrumental variable approach. Our results suggest, first, that most government spending categories, including social protection, are on average negatively related to individual well-being. Secondly, estimated marginal effects of health, education and social protection spending at different income levels show that spending increases always have a stronger negative effect on high income groups’ well-being than on low income groups’ life satisfaction. For all government spending categories, marginal happiness effects of higher public spending are clearly negative for income groups at the top.     

Peer effects in Austrian schools

This study deals with educational production in Austria and is focused on the impact of schoolmates on students’ academic outcomes. We use PISA 2000 and 2003 data to estimate peer effects for 15 and 16 year old students. School fixed effects are employed to address the potential self-selection of students into schools and peer groups. The estimations show significant positive effects of the peer group on students’ reading achievement, and less so for mathematics. The peer effect in reading is larger for students from less favorable social backgrounds. Furthermore, quantile regressions suggest peer effects in reading to be asymmetric in favor of low-ability students, meaning that students with lower skills benefit more from being exposed to clever peers, whereas those with higher skills do not seem to be affected much.     

HOW HAS THE CRISIS OF 2008–09 AFFECTED SUBJECTIVE WELL‐BEING? EVIDENCE FROM 25 OECD COUNTRIES

This paper uses life satisfaction data of almost 140,000 individuals in 25 OECD countries to study how changes in the rates of GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation during the macroeconomic crisis of 2008–09 have affected subjective well‐being. The relative contributions of the three macroeconomic variables to individuals’ life satisfaction are used to assess how each country performed on balance during the crisis. This approach follows a recent trend of using subjective well‐being data for monitoring economic performance and for policy appraisal. We find that in the countries most strongly affected by the crisis, the effects on an average citizen's well‐being may be of a similar magnitude as the effects of the most serious personal life events. The main driver of these effects is the drop in GDP, whose impact is aggravated by the increase of unemployment. Though the inflation rate went down in several of the countries, the effect was too weak to significantly reduce the negative effect of the changes in GDP and unemployment. The results show that GDP fluctuations are important drivers of subjective well‐being.     

MEASURING QUALITY IN SOCIAL CARE SERVICES: THEORY AND PRACTICE

ABSTRACT 1 : Measuring and assessing service quality in the social care sector presents distinct challenges. The ‘experience’ good properties of social care, for instance, and the large influence played by subjective judgements about the quality of personal relationships between carer and user and of process‐related service characteristics make it difficult to develop indicators of service quality, including those of service impact on final outcomes. Using some of the key features of the ‘Production of Welfare’ approach, the paper discusses recent developments in the UK of the theoretical and practical frameworks used for assessing quality in social care and for understanding the final impact of services on the wellbeing of their recipients. Key current and future challenges to the development of such frameworks include difficulties in disentangling the impact of social care services on final outcomes from the often dominating effects of other, non‐service related factors, and the generalization of consumer‐directed care models and of the ‘personalization’ of care services. These challenges are discussed in the context of the different possible applications of quality indicators, including their role as supporting the service commissioning process and their use for assessing the performance of service providers.     

An assessment of trends in technology use,innovative work practices and employees’ attitudes in Europe

Several studies of innovative work practices show a positive link with firm performance and employees’ task involvement, organizational commitment and citizenship behaviours. One of the recent changes faced by firms is the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Although several empirical studies analyse the links between ICT use, innovative work practices and firm performance, employee-level analyses are scarce. Using data from the European Working Condition Survey (EWCS), this article investigates the relationships between use of the Internet and computers and positive attitudes among employees (social support, job satisfaction, extra effort) in the European context. Our empirical results are based on data for more than 9500 employees from 16 European countries in 2005, and more than 14 000 in 2010. Among the different effects of ICT use, based on the results for the 2005, 2010 and the pooled 2005–2010 sample, and in a within-cohorts change analysis, we find that Internet use is positively related to employees’ job satisfaction and extra effort. We find that computer use is not related to employees’ behaviours. We find also that most of the innovative work practices considered are positively related to employees’ positive attitudes.     

用户交互对产品知识认知扩散的影响及社区激励研究

网络产品社区中以用户发帖、评论为代表的深度交互行为是快速认知新产品知识并传播扩散的动力源泉。基于社会资本理论,依托小米社区论坛手机产品板块,采用数据挖掘与社会网络分析方法,分别从具有典型交互行为特征用户的发帖数量与质量角度,研究用户交互对产品知识认知扩散的影响。结果表明,用户发帖作为响应社区活动的特殊评论形式,其发帖数量对扩散有显著正向影响;发帖题目长度对扩散有显著负向影响;过长或过短的发帖内容长度都会对扩散产生显著负向影响;新帖发布者的发帖内容平均长度与用户社交行为习惯相吻合,简要少量的信息能够有效激励用户的高频次交互。研究结果有助于指导社区针对典型交互行为特征用户提出相应的激励策略,促进社区新产品推广并使用户快速形成产品认知。     

Religious polarization,religious conflicts and individual financial satisfaction: Evidence from India

The extant literature finds religion to be a major determinant of life satisfaction. However, in contexts characterized by religious tensions, the outcome may be very different. In particular, the literature shows that religious polarization has a major influence on some economic outcomes. The analysis presented in the paper tries to identify the impact of religious polarization on a major component of life satisfaction: financial satisfaction. The paper inquires how belonging to a minority religion and living in areas with different levels of religious polarization affect the individual satisfaction with the financial situation of the household. The results show that the members of minority religious groups are less satisfied than the members of the dominant group, and that the financial satisfaction decreases—for a given income—as the religious polarization increases.     

社会资本视角下农民用水户满意度研究——基于陕西省宝鸡峡灌区农民用水户的调查

以社会资本为研究视角,对社会资本维度进行划分,并运用有序Logistic模型,基于陕西省宝鸡峡灌区农民用水户的调查,研究农民用水户对农民用水户协会的满意度及影响因素。研究结果表明,结构维度和认知维度社会资本是影响用水户对协会满意度的重要因素,家庭收入水平、农业收入占家庭收入比重、渠系完好率、协会专业化程度以及用水户参与积极性对用水户满意度有显著影响;关系维度社会资本、用水户性别、年龄、文化程度对用水户满意度没有显著影响。这表明农民用水户协会主要承担着灌溉管理和农业发展的职能,而其承担的社会功能相对较弱。     

The impact of coal price fluctuations on China’s economic output

Due to the important role of coal in China’s macroeconomic growth, the price of coal significantly influences its economic output. Employing a VAR model, a cointegration test and a state-space model of time-varying variables, this article analyses the influence of coal price fluctuations on the volume and structure of China’s economic output, including both the strength and the time delay of such influence. This article further explores the corresponding relationships between coal price fluctuations and variations in the effects of these fluctuations to analyse the asymmetric influence of coal price fluctuations on China’s macroeconomy. Coal price fluctuations exerted significant long-term positive effects and short-term negative effects on China’s output variables, with an average delay of 11 months; they had positive effects on investment and consumption over the long term and an increasingly negative effect on imports and exports. The average delays were 9 months for investment, 6.5 months for consumption and 10 months for imports and exports. There was an asymmetric correlation between coal price fluctuations and the time-varying elasticity of their impact on GDP. The results in this study are consistent with the actual operating circumstances of the Chinese economy.     

Privacy rights in online interactions and litigation dynamics: A social custom view

We develop a social custom model where a population of social media users decide whether to remain online and accept the platform’s data-gathering policy or abandon the social media and litigate for privacy violations. By allowing the users’ concerns for informational security to co-evolve with the number of privacy-related trials, we find that the system may converge to multiple equilibria. When users put relative emphasis on the relational benefits of online interactions, privacy-related trials remain contained and the provider imposes no limitations to its data-gathering activities. Conversely, when users put relative emphasis on the privacy costs of web-mediated interactions, privacy-related trials become endemic and platforms modulate their data-gathering activities by mediating between profitability and the legal implications of their choice. We use these results to comment the recent shift in the users’ orientation towards online platforms and caution against the inability of institutions to keep up with the process of technological change.     

Satisfaction and comparison income in transition and developed economies

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of different types of income comparison on subjective well-being in transition countries and developed European countries. The paper relies on the Life in Transition Survey (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 2011), which was conducted in late 2010 jointly by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank. The emphasis of the paper is on income comparisons, specifically; local comparisons and self-ranking. The main findings reveal that comparisons have a significant impact on life satisfaction in transition countries, whereas the relationship between comparison and life satisfaction is ambiguous in developed European countries. In transition countries, the impact of comparisons is asymmetric: in most cases, under-performing one’s benchmark has a greater effect than out-performing it. In transition countries, both downward and upward evaluations have an impact on life satisfaction, while it is worthy of note that all upward evaluations have no effect on life satisfaction in developed European countries.     

浅析电视节目主持人的屏幕整体形象定位

新闻电视节目主持人的屏幕整体形象定位是提高主持人的社会知名度和节目的社会影响力的前提条件,精准的形象设计可以充分发挥电视传媒的文化影响力,提高我国电视传媒的市场竞争力,满足广大观众日益提高的审美需求。     

Ubiquitous interactive visualization of 3D mantle convection using a web-portal with Java and Ajax framework

We have developed a new strategy and espouse a novel paradigm for large-scale computing and real-time interactive visualization. This philosophy calls for intense interactive sessions for a couple of hours at a time at the expense of storing data on many disk drives during regular or heroic runs on massively parallel systems. We have already carried out successfully real-time volume-rendering visualization by employing hundreds of processors for a grid with over 25 million unknowns. Both Cartesian and spherical 3D mantle convection are visualized. The volume-rendered images are viewed on a large display device, with many panels holding around 13 million pixels. We will employ a software strategy involving an hierarchical rendering service, which will have as software an Ajax interface for interactive visualization of large data sets on many different platforms from desktop PC’s to hand-held devices, such as the OQO and the Nokia N-800. An option for stereo viewing is also implemented. We have installed a user interface as web application, using Java and Ajax framework in order to achieve over the Internet reasonable accessibility to our ongoing runs. Our goal is to expand the array of interactive devices, which will make it feasible to carry out ubiquitous visualization and monitoring of large-scale simulations or onsite events and to allow for collaborations across oceans.     

Coups d’état and the cost of debt

This paper extends the literature on the economic consequences of coups d’état by examining their impact on the cost of debt for sovereigns and, respectively, the likelihood of experiencing a sovereign default. Using a monthly panel dataset covering 134 countries over the period 1990 to 2014 and after employing the entropy balancing methodology, I find that the occurrence of coups d’état significantly increases the cost of debt for sovereigns and their likelihood of experiencing sovereign defaults. I demonstrate that this finding is extremely robust to different specifications, potential omitted variables, and the use of falsification tests. Moreover, I show that the impact of coups d’état on the cost of debt varies systematically depending on the political regime, the types of coups d’état, and the sovereign credit rating grade. Finally, I provide suggestive evidence that the induced drop in the real economic growth, the changes in the willingness function to honor contracts and irrational exuberance are the root of increased sovereign debt cost and the likelihood of defaults following coups d’état.     

Developing and Implementing an Internet-Based Financial System Simulation Game

Thanks to the Internet and server-side technology such as Active Server Pages (ASP), faculty can develop, implement, and share interactive pedagogy easily and inexpensively. The Financial System Simulator (FSS) is an example of an interactive game that the author has developed. The FSS is an Internet-based, interactive teaching aid that introduces undergraduate students to the domestic and international consequences of monetary policy. Although simulators are common among computer-aided interactive learning devices in today's undergraduate economics curricula, the FSS is different from the others because it allows students, who represent nations, to interact with each other rather than with a computer. The exercise provides users with real-time outcomes based on their decisions, as well as the decisions of other students. According to student surveys, the game helped students understand monetary policy and kept students motivated and interested.     

Tuition fees and social segregation: lessons from a natural experiment at the University of Paris 9-Dauphine

Using a natural experiment, a sharp rise in tuition fees in some of the programmes at the University of Paris 9-Dauphine, we study the impact of tuition fees on students’ pathways, and outcomes. We apply an optimal matching method to the national database of students’ registrations (SISE) to define a typology of pathways. We then use a nonordered multinomial logit model to evaluate the impact of the rise in tuition fees on the types of pathways selected by the university. We show that there is a significant impact on these pathways. The increase in tuition fees reduces geographic and social mobility, thereby accentuating the phenomena of social segregation. Furthermore, contrary to what some of the studies assert, the rise does not appear to encourage greater effort: we find no impact on the graduation success rate.     

How much does money really matter? Estimating the causal effects of income on happiness

There is a long tradition of psychologists finding small income effects on life satisfaction (or happiness). Yet the issue of income endogeneity in life satisfaction equations has rarely been addressed. The present paper is an attempt to estimate the causal effect of income on happiness. Instrumenting for income and allowing for unobserved heterogeneity result in an estimated income effect that is almost twice as large as the estimate in the basic specification. The results call for a reexamination on previous findings that suggest money buys little happiness, and a reevaluation on how the calculation of compensatory packages to various shocks in the individual’s life events should be designed.     

Beauty is the promise of happiness?

We measure the impact of individuals' looks on life satisfaction and happiness. Using six data sets, from Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we construct beauty measures in a number of different ways. Beauty raises happiness: A one standard-deviation change in beauty generates about 0.08 standard deviations of additional satisfaction/happiness among men, 0.07 among women. The finding is robust to a rare opportunity to measure it using an instrumental variables approach. Accounting for a wide variety of covariates, particularly educational, marital, and labor-market outcomes that might be affected by beauty, the gross effects are roughly halved, with small reductions arising from the impact of beauty on monetary outcomes.     

Income comparison,gender roles and life satisfaction

This article uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to analyse the effect of within household income comparison on individual life satisfaction. Our within couple and individual fixed-effects panel estimates suggest that gender roles influence subjective well-being (SWB). A primary breadwinner wife decreases a couple’s individual happiness by eight per cent. The article adds to the findings on interdependence of SWB and hints at negative consequences of traditional gender identity norms for individual happiness.