During the most recent decades people in industrialised countries have reported both a stagnant or even declining subjective well-being, as Easterlin (1974) originally observed, and deterioration in their social and family bonds, as Putnam (2000) has claimed. The paper proposes an integrated...

In this paper we empirically investigate the relationship between social capital and the supply of labor. We identify social capital with non-market relationships. Data are obtained from the US General Social Survey for the period 1976-2004. We find evidence that social capital affects the...

Most popular explanations of the happiness paradox cannot fully account for the lack of growth in U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years (Blanchflower and Oswald (2004)). In this paper we test an alternative hypothesis, namely that the decline in U.S. social capital is responsible...

Nowadays, people in OECD countries spend about as much time watching television as earning a living. In this Paper I report a puzzling fact about those time uses: television viewing and work hours are positively correlated across countries. A simple model based on complementarities in the...

Evidence from a sample of countries show that people roughly spend as much time watching television as earning their living. Moreover, television viewing and work hours are positively correlated across countries. A simple model based on complementarities in the organization of free time is...