By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being...

We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer...

Progress in closing differences in many objective outcomes for blacks relative to whites has slowed, and even worsened, over the past three decades. However, over this period the racial gap in well-being has shrunk. In the early 1970s data revealed much lower levels of subjective well-being...

The number of refugees worldwide is now 12 million, up from 3 million in the early 1970s. And the number seeking asylum in the developed world increased tenfold, from about 50,000 per annum to half a million over the same period. Governments and international agencies have grappled with the twin...

This paper revisits demographic dividend issues after almost two decades of debate. In 1998, David Bloom and Jeffrey Williamson used a convergence model to estimate the impact of demographic-transition-driven age structure effects and calculated what the literature has come to call the...

This paper asks whether history can shed light on the modern debate about immigration's labour market impact in high wage economies. It examines the relationship between migration and capital flows in the age of mass migration before 1914, the so-called first global century. It then assesses the...