July 2006

IZA DP No. 2237: Is Man Doomed to Progress?

published in: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2008, 68 (1), 140-152

This paper is dedicated to the empirical exploration of the welfare effect of expectations and progress per se. Using ten waves of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a panel household survey rich in subjective variables, the analysis suggests that for a given total stock of inter-temporal consumption, agents are more satisfied with an increasing time-profile of consumption: they seem to have a strong “taste for improvement”.