In this paper, the authors construct country-specific chronologies of house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1-2009:Q4. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of fundamental and filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one...

The aim of this paper is to provide fresh empirical evidence of the mechanisms through which wage inequality affects worker satisfaction. Theoretically, wages of others may affect workers' utility for two main reasons: Workers may derive well-being from their social status (comparison...

In this paper, we use survey data to analyze the rationality of professional macroeconomic forecasts. We analyze both individual forecasts and average forecasts. We provide evidence on the properties of forecasts for all the G7-counties and four different macroeconomic variables. Furthermore, we...

In this paper we analyze the power of various indicators to predict growth rates of aggregate production using real-time data. In addition, we assess their ability to predict turning points of the economy. We consider four groups of indicators: survey data, composite indicators, real economic...

Most people in Europe live in urban environments. For these people, urban green space is an important element of well-being, but it is often in short supply. We use self-reported information on life satisfaction and different individual green space measures to explore how urban green space...

Following a major earthquake off the Pacific coast of Japan, a tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three reactors in Fukushima, causing a major nuclear accident on 11 March 2011. Based on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach we use panel data for 5,979 individuals...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...

Diversification into non-agricultural activities in rural areas can be broadly classified as either survival-led or opportunity-led. The existence of these two types of non-agricultural activities implies a U-shaped relationship between the share of income derived from non-agricultural...

This paper evaluates the effect of AIDS-related mortality on per-capita incomes of surviving household members, using a large nationally representative sample of rural households from Zambia. To minimize selection bias that may arise because AIDS is likely to be the endogenous outcome of...