Trends in skill bias and greater turbulence in modern labor markets put wages and employment prospects of unskilled workers under pressure. Weak incentives to utilize and maintain skills over the life-cycle become manifest with the ageing of the population. Reinvention of human capital policies...

The increasing wage inequality in many countries is usually seen as brought about by economic forces that drive for economic efficiency within a changing technological and social environment. Ethical evaluations of these developments diverge, yet the view that free labor markets drive to...

This paper shows that within-country happiness inequality has fallen in the majority of countries that have experienced positive income growth over the last forty years, in particular in developed countries. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, which states that...

This paper proposes a new unified theory of sociobehavioral forces. The goal of the new theory is to integrate theories describing five sociobehavioral processes - comparison (including justice and self-esteem), status, power, identity, and happiness - bringing under a single theoretical...

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...

The labor market is the main channel through which economic growth affects poverty. This paper is the first empirical account of main channels through which the growth in transition period has affected labor market and living standards in Georgia. It is based on both the official aggregate...

The goal of scientific work is to understand more and more by less and less. In this effort, theoretical unification plays a large part. There are two main types of theoretical unification – unification of different theories of the same field of phenomena and unification of theories of...

Studies using the Gini Index as a measure of income inequality have consistently found a positive and significant effect of the Gini on both happiness and life satisfaction. Two new measures used here – the ratio of persons in the lowest income decile relative to the number in the highest, and...

This paper examines the economic impact of the second great immigration wave (1945- 2000) on the US economy. Contrary to recent studies, we estimate that immigration induced important net gains and small redistributive effects among natives. Our analysis relies on a computable general...

The pool of early retirees is characterized by a large heterogeneity along several criteria. The present paper focuses on the key distinction between those in forced early retirement and those who retire early by individual choice. We start by estimating a retirement probit model for older...