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 … happiness. Together these findings indicate a clear role for absolute income and a more limited role for relative income …

1950s. Finally, we turn to the determinants of a broad array of development indicators for the year 1960 and for the 1960 …

We study the evolution of racial educational inequality across US states from 1940 to 2000. We show that throughout …

In recent theories of comparative development the role of institutional differences has been crucial. Yet what explains … homogeneous in many ways, they experienced radically different paths of economic (and political) development which is conventional … development are conditional on the form that political competition takes in society. Endowments are not fate. …

, we find that the legacy of slavery does not affect current income per capita, but does affect current income inequality …. Moreover, we find that the impact of slavery on current income inequality is determined by racial inequality. We test three … alternative channels of transmission between slavery and inequality: a land inequality theory, a racial discrimination theory and …

comparative development. We also show that ethnic inequality goes in tandem with lower levels development within countries. Using … countries. We construct measures of ethnic inequality combining ethnolinguistic maps on the spatial distribution of groups with … satellite images of light density at night. Ethnic inequality is strongly inversely related to per capita income; this pattern …

‘happiness’, we find that there is a large, negative and significant effect of inequality on happiness in Europe but not in the … US. There are two potential explanations. First, Europeans prefer more equal societies (inequality belongs in the utility … ideological lines. There is evidence of ‘inequality generated’ unhappiness in the US only for a sub-group of rich leftists. In …

-2006. While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s … happiness by education have widened substantially. We develop an integrated approach to measuring inequality and decomposing … changes in the distribution of happiness, finding a pervasive decline in within-group inequality during the 1970s and 1980s …