Browse

In the past three decades, the number of obese adults in the United States has doubled and the number of obese children almost tripled, which may lead to increased medical expenditures, productivity loss, and stress on the health care system. Economic analysis now shows that weight gain is the result of individual choices in response to economic environments and demonstrates that incentives can influence individual behaviors affecting weight. Determinants are varied and include year- and area-specific food prices, availability of food outlets and recreational facilities, health insurance, and minimum wage levels. This book aims to provide foundation for evaluating the costs and benefits of various proposals designed to control obesity rates.

At its core, an economy is about providing goods and services for human well-being. But many economists and critics preach that an economy is something far different: a cold and heartless system that operates outside of human control. This work asks a compelling question: If our economic world is something that we as humans create, aren't ethics and human relationships—dimensions of a full and rich life—intrinsically part of the picture? Is it possible to take this thing we call economics and give it a body and a soul? The book argues against the well-ingrained notion that economics is immune to moral values and distant from human relationships. Here, the book locates the impediment to envisioning a more considerate economic world in an assumption that is shared by both neoliberals and the political left. Despite their seemingly insurmountable differences, it notes that they both make use of the metaphor, first proposed by Adam Smith, that the economy is a machine. This pervasive idea, the book argues, has blinded us to the qualities that make us work and care for one another—qualities that also make businesses thrive and markets grow. We can wed our interest in money with our justifiable concerns about ethics and social well-being. And we can do so if we recognize that an economy is not a machine, but a living, beating heart that circulates blood to all parts of the body while also serving as an emblem of compassion and care.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these questions, investigating the ways in which school choice affects a wide range of issues. Combining the results of empirical research with analyses of the basic economic forces underlying local education markets, this book presents evidence concerning the impact of school choice on student achievement, school productivity, teachers, and special education. It also tackles difficult questions such as whether school choice affects where people decide to live and how choice can be integrated into a system of school financing that gives children from different backgrounds equal access to resources. Contributors discuss the latest findings on Florida's school choice program as well as voucher programs and charter schools in several other states. The resulting volume not only reveals the promise of school choice, but examines its pitfalls as well, showing how programs can be designed that exploit the idea's potential but avoid its worst effects.

Since the earliest days of philosophy, thinkers have debated the meaning of the term happiness and the nature of the good life. But it is only in recent years that the study of happiness—or “hedonics”—has developed into a formal field of inquiry, cutting across a broad range of disciplines and offering insights into a variety of crucial questions of law and public policy. This book brings together the best and most influential thinkers in the field to explore the question of what makes up happiness—and what factors can be demonstrated to increase or decrease it. The book offers an account of the way that hedonics can productively be applied to psychology. It also considers the unexpected relationship between happiness and health problems. It further views hedonics through the lens of cost–benefit analysis, another chapter considers the relationship between happiness and taxation, and the book also examines the role crime—and fear of crime—can play in people's assessment of their happiness, and much more.

This book investigates several important issues in the economics of aging, including the accumulation of wealth and the relationship between health and financial prosperity. Examining the changes in savings behavior and investment priorities in the United States over the past few decades, it points to a dramatic shift from employer-managed, defined benefit pensions to employee-controlled retirement savings plans. Further, the legislative reforms of the 1980s and the booming stock market of the 1990s did their share to influence individual wealth accumulation patterns of Americans. The book also explores the relationship between health status and economic status. Considering issues like pension income and health, mortality, and medical care, it presents evidence from the United States, Britain, South Africa, and Russia. The volume culminates with wide-ranging discussions on a number of key topics in the field including the innovations that have contributed to a decline in mortality rates; the various medical advances that have benefited populations over time; and the determinants of expenditures on health. The findings with regard to cross-sectional differences in health outcomes and health care utilization also pose troubling questions for policymakers seeking to democratize health care across regions and races.

The baby boom generation's entry into old age has led to an unprecedented increase in the elderly population. The social and economic effects of this shift are significant, and in this book, a group of leading researchers takes an eclectic view of the subject. Among the broad topics discussed are work and retirement behavior, disability, and their relationship to the structure of retirement and disability policies. While choices about when to retire are made by individuals, these decisions are influenced by a set of incentives, including retirement benefits and health care, and this volume includes cross-national analyses of the effects of such programs on these decisions. Furthermore, the volume also offers in-depth analysis of the effects of retirement plans, employer contributions, and housing prices on retirement. It explores well-established relationships among economic circumstances, health, and mortality, as well as the effects of poverty and lower levels of economic development on health and life satisfaction. By combining micro and macro evidence, this volume continues a tradition of expanding the research agenda on the economics of aging.

The book addresses the phenomenon of resistance to innovation, and its antecedents and manifestations. Countering the prevalent pro-innovation bias, we focus on those consumers who are last to adopt innovations, under the premise that a better understanding of their underlying motivations can help innovation and change agents avoid or overcome resistance. We unravel in the book an overarching model of resistance, whereby sources of resistance are integrated, and an intriguing set of manifestations are discussed. In Part I, our focus is on the sources of resistance, with each chapter addressing a different source. In Chapter 1 our focus is on internal, psychological, sources of resistance, in the form of personality predispositions. In Chapter 2 we move to discuss the role of perceived harm as the main force driving resistance. In Chapter 3 we discuss the process through which innovations are introduced. Chapter 4 addresses the role of the context, or setting, within which innovations are launched. In Part II, we discuss three manifestations of resistance, starting with the consumer leapfrogging effect, in Chapter 5, through the role of negative word-of-mouth, in Chapter 6, and ending with the Saddle Effect in Chapter 7. The phenomena we present and arguments we make are based on rigorous empirical research and discussed in the book through many real-life examples of innovations that, often surprisingly, have been resisted.

Every day young people engage in risky behaviors that affect not only their immediate well-being but their long-term health and safety. These chapters apply diverse economic analyses to a wide range of unsafe activities, including teen drinking and driving, smoking, drug use, unprotected sex, and criminal activity. Economic principles are further applied to mental health and performance issues such as teenage depression, suicide, nutritional disorders, and high school dropout rates. Together, the chapters yield notable findings: price and regulatory incentives are critical determinants of high-risk behavior, suggesting that youths do apply some sort of cost/benefit calculation when making decisions; the macroeconomic environment in which those decisions are made matters greatly; and youths who pursue high-risk behaviors are significantly more likely to engage in similar behaviors as adults. This volume provides both a data source for public policy makers and a clear affirmation of the usefulness of economic analysis to our understanding of risky behavior.

In the past few years, the economic ramifications of aging have garnered close attention from a group of NBER researchers led by David A. Wise. This volume continues to analyze a nexus of age-related issues. This volume begins by looking at the implications of private and public personal retirement plans, focusing in particular on the impact of 401(k) programs on retirement strategies in light of potential social security reform and factors such as annuitization and on asset accumulation. Next, the often-observed relationship between health and wealth is dissected from two different perspectives and correlated with striking increases in health-care spending over the past two decades, despite the improved health of older populations. The volume concludes with an investigation of the retirement effects of various social security provisions in both U.S. and German systems. This collection expands the current investigative focus and broadens the dialogue on a rapidly growing area of social and economic concern.