The standard of living in the industrialized nations has been steadily increasing over the last few decades. Yet some observers wonder whether we are really getting any happier. This paper addresses that question by examining well-being data on 100,000 randomly sampled Americans and Britons from...

Using data from all those born in a single week in 1958 in Britain we track the consequences of short pain and chronic pain in mid-life (age 44) on health, wellbeing and labor market outcomes in later life. We examine data taken at age 50 in 2008, when the Great Recession hit and then five years...

Using data across countries and over time we show that women are unhappier than men in unhappiness and negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used - anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger - and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless...

We investigate whether top managers affect the performance of large and complex public sector organizations, using as a case study CEOs of English public hospitals (large, complex organizations with multi-million turnover). We study the extent to which CEOs are differentiated in terms of their...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The...

In this paper we examine the causal impact of competition on management quality. We analyze the hospital sector where geographic proximity is a key determinant of competition, and English public hospitals where political competition can be used to construct instrumental variables for market...

UK population growth over the past thirty-five years has been remarkably low in comparison with other countries; the population grew by just 7% between 1971 and 2004, less than all the other EU15 countries. The UK population has grown at a faster pace since the turn of the millennium. Both the...

This paper uses broadly comparable micro data at the level of the individual to examine the extent to which union relative wage effects vary across groups and through time. The main findings may be summarized as follows. a) The union wage gap averages 15% in the US and 10% in Great Britain. b)...

Following Phillip's original work on the UK, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper adopts a different...

In this paper we evaluate the success of policies that were implemented in the 1980s that were designed to improve the workings of the UK labour market. Our primary conclusion is that the Thatcherite reforms succeeded in their goals of weakening union power; may have marginally increased...