The morality of freedom

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology continues to be one of the most sought after and most often cited series in this field. Containing contributions of major empirical and theoretical interest, this series represents the best and the brightest in new research, theory, and practice in social psychology. This serial is part of the Social Sciences package on ScienceDirect. Visit info.sciencedirect.com for more information. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology is available online on ScienceDirect - full-text online of volume 32 onward. Elsevier book series on ScienceDirect gives multiple users throughout an institution simultaneous online access to an important complement to primary research. Digital delivery ensures users reliable, 24-hour access to the latest peer-reviewed content. The Elsevier book series are compiled and written by the most highly regarded authors in their fields and are selected from across the globe using Elsevier's extensive researcher network. For more information about the Elsevier Book Series on ScienceDirect Program, please visit store.elsevier.com. * One of the most sought after and most often cited series in this field* Contains contributions of major empirical and theoretical interest* Represents the best and the brightest in new research, theory, and practice in social psychology

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Advances in experimental social psychology

The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of current consumer
finance research from multidisciplinary perspectives. The chapters are contributed by leading researchers in consumer finance.

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Handbook of Consumer Finance Research

Research Summary
In this article, we review the theoretical paradigm underlying cost–benefit analysis and address some of the critiques of this framework that have arisen within criminal justice circles and other policy areas. We also review existing studies devoted to estimating the costs of specific crimes. We offer a brief discussion categorizing the alternative costs of crime and the various methodological approaches taken (hedonic analysis, contingent valuation, and accounting methods), with an explicit discussion of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach and debates within the economics profession pertaining to these methodologies. We argue that cost considerations broadly defined should be of central importance in criminal justice policy debates. However, we also highlight the potential for cost-consideration and important equity criteria to come into conflict.

Policy Implications
Policy makers should consider careful cost–benefit analysis as an important criterion in criminal justice policy. Given some features of criminal justice policy choices such as the unequal distribution of the costs of criminal victimization, anti-crime enforcement, and the potential for perceived illegitimacy of the criminal justice system to undermine various public institutions, we argue that equity considerations also deserve careful attention. In practice, we place greater confidence in the use of cost-of-crime estimates to judge the relative effectiveness of alternative interventions, and we are cautious regarding policy prescriptions emanating from benefit–cost ratios that are marginally greater than one.

The Role of the Cost-of-Crime Literature in Bridging the Gap Between Social Science Research and Policy Making

This study’s purpose is to investigate how implicit family financial socialization (family communication quality and family economic enmeshment) influences emerging adults’ objective and subjective...

Implicit Family Financial Socialization and Emerging Adults’ Financial Well-Being: A Multi-Informant Approach

The subjective assessment of personal income, insofar as it reflects or sheds light upon the (potentially different) economic incentive structures facing workers of different demographic groups, has far-reaching implications for public policy and private decision-making alike. This paper explores the impact of personal income on financial satisfaction and on perceived income, focusing on demographic differences across the following groups: white males, black males, white females and black females. The results indicate that different race/gender pairs do respond to income differently. For both financial satisfaction and perceived relative income, white females, black females and black males all have lower returns to personal income than do white males. White males, in other words, appear to reap more “bang for the buck” in terms of both of the outcome variables, even after a host of control variables are introduced. The possibility that social comparison among (racial and gender) ingroups is driving the observed demographic differences is discussed.

Financial Satisfaction and Perceived Income through a Demographic Lens: Do Different Race/Gender Pairs Reap Different Returns to Income?

Financial Satisfaction and Perceived Income Through a Demographic Lens: Do Different Race/Gender Pairs Reap Different Returns to Income?

This paper reviews the economic analysis of economic damages, shows the paradoxes of its extension to non-economic damages, and then turns to the three damage measures — value of statistical life (VSL), happiness equivalent, and Hand Rule Damages (HRD).

Damages for Incompensable Harms

This paper employs survey data on subjective well-being and a battery of self-assessed health measures to estimate the hedonic impact of emotional health, as decoupled from its physical counterpart. The disaggregation of global health into physical and emotional components is done with a parochial eye toward tort law, which has historically drawn a distinction between physical and emotional harms, limiting recovery on the latter — particularly “stand-alone” emotional harms through various common law doctrines. The results of three sets of regression analyses suggest that a range of potentially inactionable emotional conditions, including emotional conditions with no concomitant physical manifestations, exert a significant negative impact on subjective well-being. Further, the emotional health variables included in the models uniformly bore stronger connections to well-being than their similarly-worded and similarly-scaled physical health analogues. In discussing the results, the paper offers a cautious defense of the use of subjective well-being measures — so-called “happiness” data — as a tool for informing the concepts of harm and injury in tort.

The Hedonic Impact of Stand-Alone Emotional Harms: An Analysis of Survey Data

Individuals and communities make choices affecting the risk of accidental death. Individuals balance risk and cost in market choices, and communities develop social norms prescribing how much risk people may impose on others (and, in some instances, on themselves). In both cases, the balance between risk and the cost of reducing it implies a value of a statistical life or “VSL.” Applying this novel distinction to the existing VSL literature, we find that community VSLs are significantly smaller in magnitude than market values: whereas market VSLs average roughly $7 million, community VSLs — those based on socially approved behaviors — average roughly $2-3 million. In terms of magnitude, community VSLs therefore fall between the values of life determined though tort litigation (which average under $1 million and vary widely) and those used in the regulatory context (which are derived from market VSLs and commonly range from $5-$7 million).This paper argues that courts and regulators should base the legal value of a life on the community value. Adopting the community value would roughly double current tort awards and halve the cost of death in regulating safety. The legal value of a life should equal the community value for practical and theoretical reasons. The practical reasons include reliability and measurability. The community value is more reliable than unaided intuition of jurors and no harder to measure than the market value. The theoretical reasons are reasonableness and validity. The community value is more reasonable because social norms embody collective judgments over time, which are less susceptible to irrationality and cognitive bias than unaided intuition or market value. The community value is more valid because the strictness of the standard of care and the seriousness of the harm belong to the same calculation. In torts, the current standard of care is too high relative to damages caused by its violation. In making safety regulations, the value of a life is far too high relative to damages in torts. These misalignments distort incentives for care and activity. Adopting the community value as the legal value would potentially place torts and safety regulation on the same, valid foundation.

David E. DePianto

Papers

Financial Satisfaction and Perceived Income through a Demographic Lens: Do Different Race/Gender Pairs Reap Different Returns to Income?

Financial Satisfaction and Perceived Income Through a Demographic Lens: Do Different Race/Gender Pairs Reap Different Returns to Income?

Damages for Incompensable Harms

The Hedonic Impact of Stand-Alone Emotional Harms: An Analysis of Survey Data

Community versus Market Values of Life