National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for "unpleasant" or "undesirable", which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country evidence on...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the relationship between international migration and international trade as well as capital movements. After taking a brief historical perspective, we first investigate migration flows between two countries in a static, neoclassical context. We allow for...

Trust in the citizens of a potential partner country may affect the decision to trade with or to migrate to a foreign country. This paper employs panel data to examine the causal impact of such bilateral trust on international trade and migration patterns. We apply instrumental variables (IV)...

This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the interaction of emigration of highly skilled labor, an economy's income gap to potential host economies of expatriates, and optimal public infrastructure investment. In a model with endogenous education and R&D investment decisions we show...

This paper examines the impact of capital market integration (CMI) on higher education and economic growth. We take into account that participation in higher education is non-compulsory and depends on individual choice. Integration increases (decreases) the incentives to participate in higher...

This paper examines changes in unionization that have occurred over the last decade or so using individual level micro data on twenty seven of the thirty OECD countries, with particular emphasis on Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Micro-data is also used to model union...

This paper provides evidence for the existence of a wage curve - a micro-econometric association between the level of pay and the local unemployment rate - in modern U.S. data. Consistent with recent evidence from more than 40 other countries, the wage curve in the United States has a long-run...

Combining data on around four million respondents from the Gallup World Poll and the US Daily Tracker Poll we rank 164 countries, the 50 states of the United States and the District of Colombia on eight wellbeing measures. These are four positive affect measures - life satisfaction, enjoyment,...

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...