A number of studies - including our own - find a mid-life dip in well-being. We review a psychology literature that claims that the evidence of a U-shape is "overblown" and if there is such a decline it is "trivial". We find remarkably strong and consistent evidence across countries and US...

This paper describes measurement of a self-employment rate and the important role the agricultural sector plays in any analysis of the determinants of self-employment. The determinants of the self-employment rate are modeled using a panel of 23 countries for the period 1966-1996. A similar...

I draw systematic comparisons across 109 data files and 132 countries of the relationship between well-being, variously defined, and age. I produce 444 significant country estimates with controls, so these are ceteris paribus effects, and find evidence of a well-being U-shape in age in one...

I examine the relationship between unhappiness and age using data from six well-being data files on nearly ten million respondents across forty European countries and the United States. I use fifteen different individual characterizations of unhappiness including despair; anxiety; loneliness;...

National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for "unpleasant" or "undesirable", which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country evidence on...

n this paper I examine changes in self-employment that have occurred since the early 1980s in the United States. It is a companion paper to a recent equivalent paper that related to the UK. Data on random samples of approximately twenty million US workers are examined taken from the Basic...

Previous literature has found that both unemployment and inflation lower happiness. This paper extends the literature by looking at more countries over a longer time period. It also considers the impacts on happiness of GDP per capita and interest rates. I find, conventionally, that both higher...

I present information on self-employment from seventy countries. Self-employment rates are generally down across the OECD. The main exceptions are the UK, and New Zealand. The probability of being self-employed across the OECD is higher for men and for older workers compared with younger...

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)...