1,720,971 research outputs found
Are fruit and vegetables good for our mental and physical health? Panel data evidence from Australia
Get PDFThis paper studies the effect of fruit and vegetable consumption on human well-being. Using individual-level panel data from a representative sample of Australian households, I estimate the intake of fruit and vegetables to have positive and statistically significant impacts on a wide range of subjective well-being measures, including life satisfaction, self-assessed health, mental health, psychological distress, and vitality. The estimated relationships are mainly non-monotonic in nature. For most well-being measures, the optimal consumption bundle consists of 4-5 daily portions of fruit and 4-5 daily portions of vegetables. The intake of fruit is predicted to have a greater relative impact (than vegetables) on overall mental health and psychological distress scores. There are also gender differences in the estimated effects, with the intake of fruit and vegetables increasing average happiness and self-reported health scores of women significantly more than that of men. Overall, the results imply that less than one-quarter of adults in Australia consume the optimal daily amount and mix of fruit and vegetables. I discuss the relevance of the findings for government policy-makers and health professionals, in reference to existing public health promotions and guidelines
Indirect reciprocity and prosocial behaviour : evidence from a natural field experiment
Get PDFSome of the greatest human achievements are difficult to imagine without prosociality. This article employs a natural field experiment to investigate indirect reciprocity in natural social interactions. We find strong evidence of indirect reciprocity in one‐shot interactions among drivers. Subjects for whom other drivers stopped were more than twice as likely to extend a similar act to a third party. This result is robust to a number of factors including age, gender, social status, presence of onlookers, and the opportunity cost of time. We provide novel evidence for the power of indirect reciprocity to promote prosocial behaviour in the field
Economic choices and status: Measuring preferences for income rank
Get PDFIn this paper we report on the trade-offs that 1,068 Australian university students make between absolute income and the rank of that income in hypothetical income distributions. We find that income rank matters independently of absolute income, with greater weight given to rank by males, migrants, and individuals from wealthy families. Rank-sensitive individuals require as much as a 200 per cent increase in income to be compensated for going from the top to the bottom of the income distribution. In terms of reference groups, we find migrants who reside abroad for longer periods of time, and with more affluent job titles, are more likely to compare themselves to others at the destination. This allows us to derive a dynamic choice model of compensating incomes that allows for endogenous tastes and rates of assimilation. The model predicts the average respondent to need a permanent increase in income of up to 14,000 (e.g. Mexico) to a society with a mean income of $46,000 (e.g. the USA)
Economic Choices and Status: Measuring Preferences for Income Rank
Get PDFIn this paper we report on the trade-offs that 1,068 Australian university students make between absolute income and the rank of that income in hypothetical income distributions. We find that income rank matters independently of absolute income, with greater weight given to rank by males, migrants, and individuals from wealthy families. Rank-sensitive individuals require as much as a 200 per cent increase in income to be compensated for going from the top to the bottom of the income distribution. In terms of reference groups, we find migrants who reside abroad for longer periods of time, and with more affluent job titles, are more likely to compare themselves to others at the destination. This allows us to derive a dynamic choice model of compensating incomes that allows for endogenous tastes and rates of assimilation. The model predicts the average respondent to need a permanent increase in income of up to 14,000 (e.g. Mexico) to a society with a mean income of $46,000 (e.g. the USA).relative utility, status, income rank, stated-preferences, migrants
Economic choices and status: measuring preferences for income rank
Get PDFWe report on the trade-offs that 1,068 Australian university students make between absolute income and the rank of that income in hypothetical income distributions. We find that income rank matters independently of absolute income, with greater weight given to rank by males, migrants, and individuals from wealthy families. Rank-sensitive individuals require as much as a 200% increase in income to be compensated for going from the top to the bottom of the income distribution. Migrants residing abroad for longer periods of time, and with more affluent job titles, are more likely to compare themselves to others at the destination. A dynamic choice model of compensating incomes predicts the average respondent to need a permanent increase in income of up to 14,000 (e.g., Mexico) to a society with a mean income of $46,000 (e.g., the USA)
The colour of a free ride
Get PDFWe use a natural field experiment to estimate the causal effect of race on discretionary favours in the marketplace. Test customers are randomly assigned to board public buses with no money to purchase a fare, leaving the bus driver to voluntarily decide whether to offer them a free ride. Based on 1,552 transactions, we uncover strong evidence of racial bias: bus drivers were twice as willing to let white testers ride free as black testers (72% vs. 36% of the time). Signals of wealth and patriotism improve minority testers’ outcomes. Our results show that white privilege extends to unregulated daily interactions
Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Health, and Optimal Taxation
Get PDFWe present a simple model of status-seeking over multiple socioeconomic domains by introducing the concept of conspicuous health as an argument in the utility function, in addition to the well-established conspicuous consumption term. We explore the implications of such a utility function for optimal income taxation, where we show an increase in concerns for conspicuous health to have an opposite effect on the marginal tax rate, compared to an increase in concerns for conspicuous consumption. Using life satisfaction panel data from Australia, along with an improved measure of exogenous reference groups (that accounts for the ‘time era’ of respondents), we find evidence of a comparison health effect
How do humans respond to large realized losses?
No full textIn a controlled field setting, in which the majority of people in our sample lose more than £90,000, we examine how human beings respond to major financial losses. University ethics boards would not allow this kind of huge-loss phenomenon to be studied with normal social-science experiments. Yet the scientific and practical issues at stake are unusually important ones. In the analyzed gameshow setting, individuals are handed £100,000 in cash. They then have to make risky decisions. Facing a sequence of seven questions, individuals are required to distribute their cash endowment over a set of possible answers. Participants lose any cash placed on a wrong answer. In a sample of British participants, we find that people become increasingly more cautious as they lose more of their cash endowment. A realized prior loss of £75,000 or more increases the propensity to fully diversify by 50 percentage points compared to a prior loss of £25,000. We find a similar cautious response in a smaller sample of US participants when the stakes are raised to $1 million US dollars. Our study appears to be the first to be able to calculate systematically how human beings react to large and unrecoverable financial losses.Published versio
How Do Humans Respond to Huge Financial Losses?
Get PDFIn a controlled field setting, in which the majority of people in our sample lose more than £90,000 ($120,000), we examine how human beings respond to major financial losses. University ethics boards would not allow this kind of huge-loss phenomenon to be studied with normal social-science experiments. Yet the scientific and practical issues at stake are unusually important ones. In our setting, individuals are handed £100,000 in cash. They then have to make risky decisions. Facing a sequence of seven questions, individuals are required to distribute their cash endowment over a set of possible answers. Participants lose any cash placed on a wrong answer. We find evidence of risk reduction after people suffer a loss in the previous decision round. A prior financial loss of £10,000 is estimated to increase the propensity to fully diversify by 6 percentage points. In terms of proportional losses, a loss of 50% or more of the remaining cash endowment increases diversification rates by approximately 13 percentage points. The fixed-effects panel data estimates are robust to the remaining cash endowment, previous diversification strategy, relative difficulty of questions, the ability level of participants, and other personal traits. The findings support a prospect theory-based model with a coefficient of loss aversion that is increasing in past losses. Our study appears to be the first to be able to calculate systematically how human beings react to enormous and unrecoverable financial losses
- …
