This paper presents metrics to estimate the size of political dynasties in the 15th Congress of the Republic of the Philippines and analyze the relationship between political dynasty and socio-economic outcomes.Results show that political dynasties comprise 70 percent of jurisdiction-based legislators in the current Congress. They possess higher net worth and win elections by larger margins of victory compared to not political dynasties. Jurisdictions of political dynasties are characterized by lower standards of living, lower human development, and higher levels of deprivation and inequality. Keywords: democracy; political dynasty; Philippine CongressDemocracies are widely touted to be able to facilitate and sustain broader and more inclusive processes of economic and human development. Scholars associate political democracy with more predictable long-run economic growth, enhanced macroeconomic stability, more rational management of economic and political shocks and crises, and improved distributional outcomes.In theory, democracies guarantee equal voice in government decision-making through a range of mechanisms like one-person-one-vote, equality in political participation, and free speech. A democracy has the potential to cultivate an environment that is responsive to the needs of its citizens that, often, brings about higher levels of human capital investments and more inclusive  Corresponding author. E-mail: RUMENDOZA@AIM.EDU 2 and equitable social and economic outcomes. However, underdeveloped democratic institutions could be associated with weak political participation and thus produce, in some cases, political dynasties. Still, political dynasties can exist in any democracy regardless of its structure. A brief survey of the literature suggests that the share of legislators with dynastic links to past parliaments range from as low as 6 percent in the United States (Dal Bo et al. 2009) There is a view that the prevalence of political dynasties signals the deterioration of political equality and the resulting political monopoly leads to a deterioration of socioeconomic outcomes that prevent people from effectively communicating their needs to their government. Moreover, dynastic officials can use the powers of the state for self-serving interests without fear of replacement or administrative sanctions. They also skew the selection of political leaders, thereby favoring those with influence, possibly preventing the best and the brightest from serving in the government, and/or biasing policies in favor of certain groups. Yet, an alternative view suggests that political dynasties afford reformists an extended time horizons that enable more effective planning and implementation of policies with long-term goals. Politicians with shorter tenures often yield to populist demands and shun difficult but necessary reforms that pay-off in the future, and are critical to sustained, robust, and inclusive growth. It is also possible that dynastic politicians possess legacy-related motivations that are strongly l...

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The development of a reliable procedure for the aggregation of individual level happiness leads to a proper understanding of group level happiness. Such a procedure is indispensable for a more responsive public policy-making. However, individual self-reports on happiness must meet the dual requirements of cardinality and relative interpersonal comparability in order that aggregation is not problematic and the resulting measure not only makes sense but also useful for group level interventions. The paper demonstrates the procedure for obtaining group level happiness using data from the Philippines.