The Easterlin paradox suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear positive...

In recent decades economists have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to...

In "The Race between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment," Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018b) combine the task-based model of the labor market with an endogenous growth model to model the economic consequences of artificial intelligence (AI). This...

Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an...

Entrepreneurship, as reflected in the start-up of new firms, the growth and market exit of existing firms, and the ow of venture capital, has been severely curtailed by the lockdown and social distancing measures taken by governments around the world in the fight against COVID-19. This paper,...

The economic impact of Articial Intelligence (AI) is studied using a (semi) endogenous growth model with two novel features. First, the task approach from labor economics is reformulated and integrated into a growth model. Second, the standard representative household assumption is rejected, so...

Because of their more limited inequality and more comprehensive social welfare systems, many perceive average welfare to be higher in Scandinavian societies than in the United States. Why then does the United States not adopt Scandinavian-style institutions? More generally, in an interdependent...

We review Baumol's typology of productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. We argue that the typology is relevant for explaining the secular decline in business dynamics. To the existing explanations for this decline, we put forward the thesis that entrepreneurship has become less...

Theory predicts that global economic growth will stagnate and even come to an end due to slower and eventually negative growth in population. It has been claimed, however, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may counter this and even cause an economic growth explosion. In this paper, we critically...