A recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival. But equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant. Using state-level panel data...

Based on static partial equilibrium analysis, the "new brain drain" literature argues that, by raising the return to education, a brain drain generates a brain gain that is, under certain conditions, larger than the brain drain itself, and that such a net brain gain results in an increase in...

Exponential growth bias (EGB) is the pervasive tendency of people to perceive a growth process as linear when, in fact, it is exponential. In this paper, we document that people exhibit EGB when asked to predict the number of COVID-19 positive cases in the future. The bias is positively...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

Using detailed establishment-level micro data, this paper analyzes the quantitative implications of the missing-growth hypothesis by Aghion, Bergeaud, Boppart, Klenow, and Li (2019) for Germany. This hypothesis states that actual growth rates of real output are systematically understated by...

We develop a model which shows that wages, prices and real income should grow faster in countries with low increase in their labour force. If not, other countries experience growing unemployment and/or trade deficit. This result is applied to the case of Germany, which has displayed a...

Using panel data from the BHPS and its Understanding Society extension, we study life satisfaction (LS) and income over nearly two decades, for samples split by education, and age - to our knowledge for the first time. The highly educated went from lowest to highest LS, though their average...

In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

This paper examines the impact of employment protection legislation on productivity in the OECD, using annual cross-country aggregate data on the degree of regulations and industry-level data on productivity from 1982 to 2003. We adopt a "difference-in-differences" framework, which exploits...

This paper introduces a novel approach for dealing with the 'curse of dimensionality' in the case of large linear dynamic systems. Restrictions on the coefficients of an unrestricted VAR are proposed that are binding only in a limit as the number of endogenous variables tends to infinity. It is...