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The impact of household income on happiness, in Europe and the United States, is examined.

We present results from a 'corruption game' (a dictator game modified so that recipients can take a side payment in exchange for accepting a reduction in the overall size of the pie). Dictators (silently) treated to be able to take more of the recipient's tokens, took more of them. They were also more likely to believe that recipients had accepted side payments, even if there was a prize for accuracy. The results favor the hypothesis that people avoid altruistic actions by distorting beliefs about others' altruism. (JEL C72, D63, D64, D83) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A survey was conducted on the cause of corruption using the corruption data indices of Business International Corp. Results showed that countries with higher firm rents and regulations are not effective in promoting competition and have higher corruption levels. However, the effects of rents on corruption are still not quite understood. Thus, to help control corruption, competition must be encouraged. When there is less competition, corruption increases as a result of higher rent imposition on bureaucrat controlled firms.

We construct measures of the extent to which the four main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption in their front page during the period 1998-2007 and correlate them with government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is considerable: a one standard deviation increase in monthly government advertising is associated with a reduction in the coverage of the government's corruption scandals by 0.23 of a front page per month, or 18% of a standard deviation in coverage. The results are robust to the inclusion of newspaper, month, newspaper president, and individual-corruption scandal fixed effects as well as newspaper-president specific time trends.