Economists increasingly accept that social norms have powerful effects on human behavior and outcomes. In recent history, one norm widely adhered to in most developed nations has been for men to be the primary breadwinner within mixed-gender households. As women have entered the labor market in...

Micro-based and macro-based approaches have been used to assess the effects of health on economic growth. Micro-based approaches aggregate the return on individual health from Mincerian wage regressions to derive the macroeconomic effects of population health. Macro-based approaches estimate a...

There is no significant relationship between the improvement in happiness and the long term rate of growth of GDP per capita. This is true for three groups of countries analyzed separately - 17 developed, 9 developing, and 11 transition - and also for the 37 countries taken together. Time series...

This paper provides estimates of the economic impact of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in China and India for the period 2012-2030. Our estimates are derived using WHO's EPIC model of economic growth, which focuses on the negative effects of NCDs on labor supply and capital accumulation. We...

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...

This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions and growth. It discusses the various measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms and the methods employed to identify the causal impact of trust on economic...

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...

The "Easterlin paradox" suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear positive...

To what extent are improvements in quality of life (material living levels, health, education, political and civil rights, happiness, and the like) associated with economic growth? International comparisons of quality of life (QoL) conditions almost always point to a strong positive association...

In this paper we develop a new empirical approach to uncovering the impact of social attitudes on economic development. We first show that trust of second-generation Americans is significantly influenced by the country of origin of their forebears. In the spirit of the epidemiology literature,...