We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer...

Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. In a complement to international studies of income differences, we investigate the extent to which quality-adjusted...

Conventional R&D-based growth theory argues that productivity growth is driven by population growth but the data suggest that the erstwhile positive correlation between population and productivity turned negative during the 20th century. In order to resolve this problem we integrate R&D-based...

We analyze the impact of status preferences on technological progress and long-run economic growth within an R&D-based framework. For this purpose, we extend the standard relative wealth approach by allowing the various assets held by households to differ with respect to their status relevance....

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

We introduce automation into a standard model of capital accumulation and show that (i) there is the possibility of perpetual growth, even in the absence of technological progress; (ii) the long-run economic growth rate declines with population growth, which is consistent with the available...

In recent decades, most industrialized countries experienced declining population growth rates caused by declining fertility and associated with rising life expectancy. We analyze the effect of continuing demographic change on medium- and long-run economic growth by setting forth an R&D-based...

Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple...

We analyze the effects of children's health on human capital accumulation and on long-run economic growth. For this purpose we design an R&D-based growth model in which the stock of human capital of the next generation is determined by parental education and health investments. We show that i)...