Avoiding a “despair death crisis” in Europe: the drivers of human (un)sustainability

The emergence of the despair death crisis in the US stimulates researchers and policymakers to look at subjective wellbeing data from a different perspective. We wonder what can be done to avoid a similar situation in Europe, and to this purpose we analyse factors correlated with depression in the European Social Survey by considering the latter as a proxy of despair deaths. We find the strongest correlations with poor income, high-income expectations, low education, low-skilled jobs, poor social relationships, failure and shocks in affective relational life. We perform robustness checks finding that our results are robust when using alternative measures of psychological health and when instrumenting married status. If causality links between all these drivers and the dependent variable are verified and confirmed, as for marital status, we can conclude that the despair death crisis depends from a mix of material and immaterial factors (with the latter being dominant) that cannot be fully solved by mere monetary redistribution.

The number but not the variety of nonprofit organizations affects donations: evidence from an experiment

We provide experimental evidence on the total and the per-capita amount of collected donations at the increase of the number and variety of organizations available for donations. We vary the number of organizations, their type (nonprofit associations and community foundations) and their charitable purposes (to help people with economic difficulties or disabilities). We show that the number, but not the variety, of nonprofit organizations positively affects the total collected donations. Moreover, we find that, when the number of organizations increases, the inelasticity of total donations to the increase in the number of organizations leads to a reduction in the average amount of collected donations.

Hierarchy and the size of a firm

In this note, we apply weighted hierarchical games of cooperative game theory to the problem of optimal firm size of the firm. In particular, we analyze the influence of production technology on the size of the firm. Our note enhances previous approaches using a permission structure with equally strong relationships between predecessor and direct successors.