One of the famous questions in social science is whether money makes people happy. We offer new evidence by using longitudinal data on a random sample of Britons who receive medium-sized lottery wins of between Đ1000 and Đ120,000 (that is, up to approximately U.S. $200,000). When compared to...

This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more left-wing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more right-wing. Parents, politicians and voters are probably not aware of this phenomenon -- nor are social scientists. The paper discusses its economic and evolutionary roots. It also...

This paper uses longitudinal data to explore whether greater job status makes a person healthier. Taking the evidence as a whole, promotees do not exhibit a health improvement after promotion. Instead the data suggest that workers with good health are more likely to be promoted. In the private...

We live in a high-divorce age. It is now common for university faculty to have students who are touched by a recent divorce. It is likely that parents themselves worry about effects on their children. Yet there has been almost no formal research into the important issue of how recent...

This paper summarizes evidence for the existence of a wage curve a downward-sloping relationship between the level of pay and the local unemployment rate in modern micro data. At the time of writing, the curve has been found in 40 nations. Its elasticity is approximately -0.1. -- wage...

The causes of people's political attitudes are largely unknown. We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing people before and after a lottery windfall, we show that winners tend to switch towards support for a right-wing political party and to become less...

How should the productivity of research universities be measured? This task is difficult but important. The recent Research Excellence Framework in the UK, which was based on peer review, suggests that there has been a marked improvement in UK academic research in economics and in many other...

Many governments wish to assess the quality of their universities. A prominent example is the UK's new Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In the REF, peer-review panels will be provided with information on publications and citations. This paper suggests a way in which panels could choose...

What makes workers happy? Here we argue that pure 'rank' matters. It is currently believed that wellbeing is determined partly by an individual's absolute wage (say, 30,000 dollars a year) and partly by the individual's relative wage (say, 30,000 dollars compared to an average in the company or...

The paper provides evidence that happiness raises productivity. In Experiment 1, a randomized trial is designed. Some subjects have their happiness levels increased, while those in a control group do not. Treated subjects have 12% greater productivity in a paid piece-rate Niederle-Vesterlund...