Do entrepreneurs earn supernormal returns, or does competitive pressure ensure that entrepreneurs receive the same utility level as workers? If those who run their own businesses get supernormal returns (or 'rents') they should be happier than those who work as employees. The paper tests this...

The paper studies the factors which shape entrepreneurship among young adults. It finds, using data on a British birth cohort, that the probability of self-employment depends sensitively upon whether the individual ever received a gift or inheritance. Those who were given or inherited £5,000,...

Why do people join open-shop unions when they would receive union wage rates even if they were not members? Why are unionization rates so low in the south-east of England? To address these questions, which we treat as interrelated, the paper considers the idea that unions offer insurance against...

Recent research has argued that psychological well-being is U-shaped through the life cycle. The difficulty with such a claim is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). Hence the apparent U may be an...

Many observers believe that times are growing harder for young people in Western society. This paper looks at the evidence and finds that conventional wisdom appears to be wrong. Using the U.S. General Social Surveys and the Eurobarometer Surveys, the paper studies the reported happiness and...

This paper, which follows in an LSE tradition begun by Phillips and Sargan, examines the role of unemployment in shaping pay. In contrast to most of the literature, it 1) uses microeconometric data on individuals and workplaces 2) examines a variety of data sets as a check on the robustness of...

The paper argues that wage determination is best seen as a kind of rent sharing in which workers' bargaining power is influenced by conditions in the external labour market. It uses British establishment data from 1984 to show that pay depends upon a blend of insider pressure (including the...

A modern statistical literature argues that countries such as Denmark are particularly happy while nations like East Germany are not. Are such claims credible? The paper explores this by building on two ideas. The first is that psychological well-being and high blood-pressure are thought by...

Although there exists a large literature on the effects of trade unions upon wages, there is no published work that uses microeconomic data to examine the employment consequences of unionization. The paper addresses this issue with a new British data set and shows that, even after the addition...

The paper provides evidence for the existence of a negatively sloped locus linking the level of pay to the rate of regional (or industry) unemployment. This "wage curve" is estimated using microeconomic data for Britain, the US, Canada, Korea, Austria, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Norway, and...