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...

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...

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...

We explore the hypothesis that high home-ownership damages the labor market. Our results are relevant to, and may be worrying for, a range of policy-makers and researchers. We find that rises in the home- ownership rate in a U.S. state are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in unemployment in...

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...

This paper studies the determinants of real wage rates using data on Canadian labour contracts signed between 1978 and 1984. Its results are consistent with Dunlop's neglected (1944) hypothesis that real pay movements are shaped by product price changes (contrary to the predictions of implicit...

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...

This paper studies the links between income, sexual behavior and reported happiness. It uses recent data on a random sample of 16,000 adult Americans. The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations. Greater income does not buy more sex, nor more sexual...