This paper uses data from the American Life Panel to understand the determinants of well-being in the United States during the Great Recession. It investigates how various dimensions of subjective wellbeing reflected in the OECD Better Life Framework impact subjective well-being. The results...

Life is quite good in the United States compared to other OECD countries, thanks to strong economic growth and technological progress having lifted average income to high levels. Nonetheless, there is evidence that the benefits from growth have not been sufficiently broad based. Self-reported...

Australia faces the mutually reinforced challenges of boosting labour supply and promoting social inclusion. Labour underutilisation is especially prevalent among groups such as lone parents, people with disability, and Indigenous Australians. These are also groups at greatest risk of social...

The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer programme implemented in rural areas in Colombia in 2002, on school enrolment and child labour. Using a quasi-experimental approach, our methodology makes use of an interesting feature of the data, which allows us...

Cannabis is the most popular illegal drug. Its legal status is typically justified on the grounds that cannabis use has harmful consequences. Empirically investigating this issue has been a fertile topic for research in recent times. We provide an overview of this literature, focusing on studies...

We analyze interaction effects of birth weight and the business cycle at birth on individual cardiovascular (CV) mortality later in life. In addition, we examine to what extent these long-run effects run by way of cognitive ability and education and to what extent those mitigate the long-run...

This article challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that greater longevity cannot explain the significant accumulation of human capital during the transition from stagnation to growth. This is because greater longevity raises children’s future income proportionally at all levels of...

Indonesia has made considerable progress over the years in improving the social conditions of its population, especially among disadvantaged groups, not least by raising government spending and strengthening social protection programmes. Nevertheless, in some respects social outcomes remain...

Restoring fiscal sustainability is a major challenge in Slovenia. Yet, the performance in terms of expenditure control is poor and public expenditure on social spending increased briskly during the crisis, significantly more than on average across the OECD. Despite recent progress in reforming...

Income inequality in Colombia has declined since the early 2000s but remains very high by international standards. While most of the inequality originates from the labour market, wealth – and thus capital income – is also highly concentrated and the tax and transfer system has little...