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Working Paper
The paradox of declining female happiness
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women?s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women?s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. ...
Working Paper
Evaluating the Effects of Geographic Adjustments on Poverty Measures Using Self-Reported Financial Well-Being Scores
A central aspect of poverty measurement is how well the measure can identify the people and places that are experiencing financial hardships. This paper explores the relationship between poverty financial hardship by using the CFPB's financial well-being scale, which reflects individuals' self-assessments of their financial challenges. Using this measure, for every 1 percentage point increase in a state's official poverty rate for working-age adults, there is a 0.59 percentage point increase in the share of working-age adults with very low financial well-being. In contrast, the state's ...
Working Paper
Because of Monopolies, Income Inequality Significantly Understates Economic Inequality
In social science research, household income is widely used as a stand-in for, or approximation to, the economic well-being of households. In a parallel way, income-inequality has been employed as a stand-in for inequality of economic well-being, or for brevity, "economic-inequality." But there is a force in market economies, ones with extensive amounts of monopoly, like the United States, which leads income-inequality to understate economic-inequality. This force has not been recognized before and derives from how monopolies behave. Monopolies, of course, raise prices. This reduces the ...