Richard Ball

TL;DR: This paper investigated how an individual's self-reported happiness is related to the level of her income in absolute terms, and relative to other people in her country, and found that both absolute and relative income are positively and significantly correlated with happiness, quantitatively, changes in relative income have much larger effects on happiness than do changes in absolute income.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated how the prevalence of collectivism or individualism in a society relates to the economic development of the society and the central premise of the article is that causality runs in two directions: the collectivist or individualist character of a society will influence the course of economic development, and simultaneously economic growth and changes in economic structure will alter the orientation of the individualism or collectivism.

TL;DR: In this article, a simple game between a special interest group and a policy-maker that captures the tradeoff between distortionary costs and the informational benefits of political influence activities is developed.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the relationship between a country's political-economic and institutional environment, and its ability to implement sustainable economic reform programs and find that despite the conventional wisdom to the contrary, political repression does not appear to be an effective means for implementing sustainable stabilization policies.