If human beings care about their relative weight, a form of imitative obesity can emerge (in which people subconsciously keep up with the weight of the Joneses). Using Eurobarometer data on 29 countries, this paper provides cross-sectional evidence that overweight perceptions and dieting are...

We explore the idea that happiness and psychological well-being are U-shaped in age. The main difficulty with this argument is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). First, using data on 500,000...

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 focuses particularly on youth unemployment, why we should be concerned about it, why it is increasing again, how the present difficulties of young people entering the labour market differ from those of the past and what useful lessons have been learned that may guide future policy. We...

Antidepressants as a commodity have been remarkably little-studied by economists. This study shows in new data for 27 European countries that 8% of people (and 10% of those middle-aged) take antidepressants each year. The probability of antidepressant use is greatest among those who are...

On almost all measures of physical health, Scots fare worse than residents of any other region of the UK and often worse than the rest of Europe. Deaths from chronic liver disease and lung cancer are particularly prevalent in Scotland. The self-assessed wellbeing of Scots is lower than that of...

Using micro-data on six surveys - the Gallup World Poll 2005-2023, the U.S. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 1993-2022, Eurobarometer 1991-2022, the UK Covid Social Survey Panel, 2020-2022, the European Social Survey 2002-2020 and the IPSOS Happiness Survey 2018-2023 - we show...