Justin Wolfers’s research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

... Firms from Google to Boeing have used prediction markets that challenge employees to second-guess each other's guesses about meeting company deadlines, reaching levels of product quality, and predicting consumer demand (e.g., Cowgill & Zitzewitz, 2015). Prediction markets have outperformed experts on company sales projections (Plott & Chen, 2002), entertainment-beat journalists on Oscar winners (Pennock, Lawrence, Nielsen, & Giles, 2001), and professional macroeconomists on macroeconomic indicators (Gürkaynak & Wolfers, 2006). Prior to the IARPA tournaments, however, the literature shed less light on a key question: Do prediction markets beat polls, all else equal? ...

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From Discipline-Centered Rivalries to Solution-Centered Science: Producing Better Probability Estimates for Policy Makers

... First, the existence of two opposing ideological perceptions that on one side demand for improved welfare spending accompanied by higher taxes, while the other side is championing for decreased welfare spending, and subsequently lower taxes (2). Second, an economist-driven welfare reform process that is characteristically promising in theory, but which lacks proper design of the transition process that makes it politically feasible (3). And finally, the fact that debates on welfare reforms remain typically narrow, hardly focusing on reforms capable of delivering comprehensive rules to govern, or better still, reconcile the welfare and tax systems (4). ...

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Welfare Without Taxation - Autonomous production revenues for Universal Basic Income

... Our findings, particularly the multifaceted relationships between GDP, life satisfaction, and environmental metrics, resonate with a growing body of literature in the realm of the economics of happiness. Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) found a clear positive relationship between GDP and well-being across countries, a result we observed in our scatter plots, especially in the low to mid GDP per capita range. However, as GDP per capita increases, the clear-cut positive relationship with life satisfaction starts to fade, a trend similarly noted by Deaton (2008), who highlighted the complexities of equating economic growth with increased well-being. ...

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Economics, happiness and climate change: exploring new measures of progress

... This concept has been extended to other measures of inequality. Happiness and satisfaction inequality have been studied before in several contexts [32][33][34][35][36]. The model by Breeden and Leonova used a measure of inequality developed specifically for ordinal data by Kobus and Miłoś [37], which is a small variation on a previous measure by Naga and Yalcin [38] (4) ...

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Scoring AI-generated policy recommendations with Risk-Adjusted Gain in Net Present Happiness

... ). Considering previous studies(Sacks et al., 2010;Stevenson & Wolfers, 2013;Altindag & Xu, 2017;Rodriguez-Pose & Maslauskaite, 2012) that argued that an increase in per capita income will positively impact the life satisfaction of people, we include GDP growth as a control variable. For instance, investigating the individual and macro-level determinants of individual life satisfaction in 10 CEE countries, Rodriguez-Pose and Maslauskaite ...

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The Impact of Corruption on Human Well-Being Within an Economic Framework: Evidence from a Cross-National Study

... Back in 1990, the United Nations considered health, education and income as the three major elements of social progress (expressed in the well-known Human Development Index). There is no doubt that income is a major conditioning of progress and happiness (Sacks et al., 2010), but the effect may not be linear. While some studies do not find a satiation point of income (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2013), the prevailing view is that high-income individuals obtain little improvements (if any) in SWB with additional income (Diener et al., 2002;Dolan et al., 2008;Mentzakis and Moro, 2009). ...

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The relationship between income and subjective well-being: the case of Spain

... At the same time, studies on the association between inflation and unemployment and trust in other institutions remain scarce, especially in economics. In a rare exception, Stevenson and Wolfers (2011) examine the correlation between the unemployment rate and trust of different institutions in the United States and countries in the Gallup World Poll (for 2005-2010). The results suggest that unemployment is strongly associated with a decline in trust in financial institutions and national governments worldwide, which is even stronger among the OECD countries. ...

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The Societal Costs of Inflation and Unemployment

... Observed preferences often do not behave this way. Prospect theory preferences in market settings (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) are suggested by observations of individual betting choices (Andrikogiannopoulou 2011) and the long-shot bias in betting prices (Snowberg and Wolfers 2010). Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) is characterized by traders maximizing a weighted value function, usually defined along a single monetary dimension. ...

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Nonconvex Equilibrium Prices in Prediction Markets

... Researchers in this field aim to understand how economic policies, institutions, and activities impact people's overall life satisfaction and happiness. Recent analysis has reevaluated the relationship between economic growth and subjective well-being, implying that while economic expansion is associated with increased happiness, there may be decreasing returns in terms of happiness as economies advance [4], [5]. ...

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Economics of Happiness: What Really Counts?

... Исследования второй половины XX в. чаще фиксировали бóльшую удовлетворенность жизнью у женщин, однако обнаружено, что в США с 1970-х гг. произошло снижение и абсолютных показателей благополучия у женщин, и относительное снижение этих характеристик относительно мужских (Stevenson, Wolfers, 2009). Авторы видят причины этого явления в снижении социальной сплоченности, увеличении тревожности, разнообразных факторах риска внутри семьи. ...

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Life satisfaction of elderly women and men