By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being...

In recent years the British National Health Service (NHS) has experienced an acute shortage of qualified nurses. This has placed issues of recruitment and retention in the profession high on the political agenda. In this Paper, we investigate the determinants of job satisfaction for nurses and...

In this paper we focus on the implications of consumer heterogeneity for whether competition will improve outcomes in health care markets. We show that competition generally favours the majority group as higher quality for the majority is an effective way to increase the quality signal and...

Many literatures investigate the causal impact of income on economic outcomes, for example in the context of intergenerational transmission or well-being and health. Some studies have proposed to use employer wage differentials and in particular industry affiliation as an instrument for income....

In a model where patients face budget constraints that make some treatments unaffordable, we ask which treatments should be covered by universal basic insurance and which by private voluntary insurance. We argue that both cost effectiveness and prevalence are important if the government wants to...

We develop a new methodology to compute differences in the expected longevity of individuals who are in different socioeconomic groups at age 50. We deal with the two main problems associated with the standard use of life expectancy: that people's socioeconomic characteristics evolve over the...

We construct indicators of the perception of job security for various types of jobs in 12 European countries using individual data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We then consider the relation between reported job security and OECD summary measures of Employment Protection...

This Paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 EU countries, using micro data from the ECHPS. Women are over-represented in part-time jobs in all countries considered, but while in northern Europe such allocation roughly reflects women’s preferences and their...

This paper investigates the effects of intensified screening of disability insurance benefit applications. A large-scale experiment was setup where in 2 of the 26 Dutch regions case workers of the disability insurance administration were instructed to screen applications more intense. The...

We study the short-run effect of involuntary job loss on comprehensive measures of public health costs. We focus on job loss induced by plant closure, thereby addressing the reverse causality problem of deteriorating health leading to job loss as job displacements due to plant closure are...