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Project

Individual Welfare Analysis based on Behavioural Economics (IWABE).

Economists evaluate social and economic policies based on their impact on the individual well-being of the members of society. Such measurement depends mostly on the assumption that individuals behave according to well-behaved (i.e. transitive and complete) preferences. Motivated by the overwhelming empirical evidence from psychology and behavioural economics, according to which individual behavior often seems inconsistent with wellbehaved preferences, we aim at developing the methodological tools for analyzing individual welfare in the presence of such seemingly inconsistencies in the behavior of agents. For doing this we will explore an intermediate approach that is in between the agnostic approach (i.e. robust conclusions without specific explanation for the inconsistencies) and the model approach (i.e. an analysis based on a specific model explaining non well-behaved preferences). For the empirical part, we will extensively use the new and largely unexplored MEqIN data set that was gathered by the PIs of this project. This data set allows to compare several methods for measuring well-being and contains detailed information on all the adults of the selected households. In the applications we will restrict our attention to four main dimensions of well-being: health, material well-being, employment status, and the family situation. In this respect we will also recontact the surveyed households to gather extra data related to our research questions.
Date:1 Jan 2018 →  31 Dec 2021
Keywords:MICRO ECONOMICS, WELFARE ECONOMICS
Disciplines:Applied economics, Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology
Project type:Collaboration project