Does consumption buy happiness? Evidence from the United States

We examine the association between various components of consumption expenditure and happiness in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative sample of older Americans. We find that only one component of consumption is positively related to happiness—leisure consumption. In contrast, consumption of durables, charity, personal care, food, health care, vehicles, and housing are not significantly associated with happiness. Second, we find that leisure consumption is associated with higher levels of happiness partially through its effect on social connectedness, as indexed by measures of loneliness and embeddedness in social networks. On one hand, these results counter the conventional wisdom that “material goods can’t buy happiness.” One the other hand, they underscore the importance of social goods and social connectedness in the production of happiness.     

Climate Change, Agriculture, and Developing Countries: Does Adaptation Matter?

Because most developing countries depend heavily on agriculture,the effects of global warming on productive croplands are likelyto threaten both the welfare of the population and the economicdevelopment of the countries. Tropical regions in the developingworld are particularly vulnerable to potential damage from environmentalchanges because the poor soils that cover large areas of theseregions already have made much of the land unusable for agriculture. Although agronomic simulation models predict that higher temperatureswill reduce grain yields as the cool wheat-growing areas getwarmer, they have not examined the possibility that farmerswill adapt by making production decisions that are in theirown best interests. A recent set of models examines cross-sectionalevidence from India and Brazil and finds that even though theagricultural sector is sensitive to climate, individual farmersdo take local climates into account, and their ability to doso will help mitigate the impacts of global warming.      

A Balancing Act: Work–Life Balance and Multiple Stakeholder Outcomes in Hospitals

This article examines the direct and indirect effects of work–life balance (WLB) practices on multiple stakeholder outcomes in hospitals. The authors examine the direct and indirect effects of WLB practices in 173 hospitals in the United Kingdom on organizational, patient care and employee outcomes. The article proposes a model in which the effects of WLB practices on patient care outcomes and financial performance are mediated by employee turnover intentions. The authors provide strong support for the potential vested in WLB practices in the healthcare setting. Results indicate that greater use of WLB practices enhances outcomes for hospitals, their employees and the patients they care for.     

Debates and Decisions: On a Rationale of Argumentation Rules

We view a debate as a mechanism by which an uninformed decision maker (the listener) extracts information from two informed debaters, who hold contradicting positions regarding the right decision. During the debate, the debaters raise arguments and, based on these arguments, the listener reaches a conclusion. Using a simple example, we investigate the mechanism design problem of constructing rules of debate that maximize the probability that the listener reaches the right conclusion, subject to constraints on the form and length of the debate. It is shown that optimal debate rules have the property that the conclusion drawn by the listener is not necessarily the same as the conclusion he would have drawn, had he interpreted the information, revealed to him or her during the debate, literally. The optimal design of debate rules requires that the information elicited from a counterargument depends on the argument it counterargues. We also link our discussion with the pragmatics literature. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D78.     

Process and context in choice models

We develop a general framework that extends choice models by including an explicit representation of the process and context of decision making. Process refers to the steps involved in decision making. Context refers to factors affecting the process, focusing in this paper on social networks. The extended choice framework includes more behavioral richness through the explicit representation of the planning process preceding an action and its dynamics and the effects of context (family, friends, and market) on the process leading to a choice, as well as the inclusion of new types of subjective data in choice models. We discuss the key issues involved in applying the extended framework, focusing on richer data requirements, theories, and models, and present three partial demonstrations of the proposed framework. Future research challenges include the development of more comprehensive empirical tests of the extended modeling framework.