Retirement and Health

A major question for practically every industrial economy is the extent to which its aging population can support retirement payments. One solution has been to think about increasing the retirement age or certainly removing barriers for people who wish to work into their late sixties. I have never been given a compelling case for not trying to do this in a world where older life expectancy has increased by so much. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that retiring is bad for one's health. A recent IZA paper examines this empirically - link here

Social Security: Collect now or later

An interesting article in the New York Times about the potential financial benefits of waiting before starting to claim your payments.

link here

Neuroeconomics survey

NEUROECONOMICS - ACTUAL DIRECTIONS IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Popescu, Bondrea & Constantinescu

Our article offers a survey of behavioral economics and in its actual directions such neuroeconomics, including his historical origins, results, and methods. Our central thesis is that the development of behavioral economics in important respects parallels the development of cognitive science. Neuroeconomics has further bridged the once disparate fields of economics and psychology. Such convergence is almost exclusively attributable to changes within economics. Neuroeconomics has inspired more change within economics than within psychology because the most important findings in Neuroeconomics have posed more of a challenge to the standard economic perspective. The single most important source of inspiration for behavioral economists has been behavioral decision research, which can, in turn, be seen as an integration of ideas from cognitive science and economics. Neuroeconomics has primarily challenged the standard economi c assump
http://mihaicovaci.intercer.org/site/37/images/28.pdf

Economics and Psychology Conference

This is just by way of update. Our second Economics and Psychology conference will take place on November 6th in Dublin. The exact venue will be confirmed shortly. I would like people to start thinking about their submissions. Particularly, if you are a PhD student and want to present feel free to get in contact for advice about preparing an abstract and presentation.

http://sites.google.com/site/econpsychireland/

Happy Planet Index

From an email from Juliet at the New Economics Foundation

The HPI measures the environmental efficiency with which, country by country, people live long and happy lives. The results turn our idea of progress on its head. The HPI reveals that around the world, high levels of resource consumption do not reliably produce high levels of well-being. Middle-income countries, such as those in Latin America and South East Asia tend to be the closest to achieving sustainable well-being whereas rich, developed nations fail to rank above the middle of the table of 143 countries.

You can explore the results in much more on our website www.happyplanetindex.org

Suggestions for Side-Bars

As you can see, we have been building back up the blog to partly act as a "resources" hub for people who work around this area. It includes things like links to funding bodies, seminar series, upcoming Institute events and we have been adding things like "resources for teaching economics" and so on. I am working on developing a forum for longer posts, as suggested by Kevin. Also, I have been emailing people with the idea of having a podcast series based on interviews and short presentations of ongoing research. Sections on "Resources for Economics PhD Students". "Resources for Psychology Students" and "Resources for Economics Students" will also appear pretty soon to reflect some of our main readers. If you read the blog and you have other suggestions for what would be useful please let me know.

Don't worry, we will also be working a bit more on the colour scheme.