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...

In recent decades economists have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to...

Do legal institutions governing financial contracts affect the nature of real investments in the economy? We develop a simple model and provide evidence that the answer to this question is yes. We consider a levered firm's choice of investment between innovative and conservative technologies, on...

The paper examines the appropriate domain of the Welfare State by exploring the areas in which free enterprise fails to provide adequate welfare state services. The paper outlines a simple coherent strategy for formulating government welfare state policy by identifying the relevant market...

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling,...

This paper examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972-2006. While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s. There have been large changes in the level of happiness...

Whereas existing literature has documented strong correlations between national incomes and measures of schooling attainment, causality has been hard to pin down. Much of empirical work had tended to interpret these correlations as implying an effect of human capital on national income, but...

We use unique retrospective family background data from the 2003 wave of the British Household Panel Survey to explore the degree to which family size and birth order affect a child’s subsequent educational attainment. Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and ‘quality’....

This paper looks at Austria's pattern of development and its lessons for Eastern Europe. Austria's development path is characterized by three features. In the post-war era Austria was among the countries with the fastest convergence rate. At the same time Austria's movement up the technological...

This survey discusses the effect of macroeconomic fluctuations on long-run growth from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. It emphasizes the ‘opportunity cost’ approach, which states that firms will intertemporally substitute productivity-enhancing activities for regular production...