How does international trade affect the popularity of governments and leaders? The recent backlash against globalization renders this question extremely topical. Yet, most previous work has looked for political effects of aggregate trade flows without decomposing into particular types of...

The well-known Easterlin paradox points out that average happiness has remained constant over time despite sharp rises in GNP per head. At the same time, a micro literature has typically found positive correlations between individual income and individual measures of subjective well-being. This...

John Stuart Mill claimed that "men do not desire merely to be rich, but richer than other men." Do people desire to be richer than others? Or is it that people desire favorable comparisons to others more generally, and being richer is merely a proxy for this ineffable relativity? We conduct an...

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life", such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can be calculated with manageable data requirements....

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...

This paper throws new light on the relationship between income and democracy. Using data for 162 countries over 1960-2018, we show that the causal relationship between political and economic development is U-shaped: "intermediate" political regimes significantly lead to inferior economic...

While skilled immigration ceteris paribus provides an immediate boost to GDP per capita by adding to the human capital stock of the receiving economy, might it also reduce the number of 'good jobs', i.e. those with training, available to indigenous workers? We analyse this issue theoretically...

In recent decades, most developed countries have experienced a simultaneous increase in income inequality and management compensation. In this paper, we study the relation between management compensation and firm-level income dynamics in a general equilibrium model. Empirical estimation, of the...

This is the first study to use an achievement test score to analyze whether the income gap between second-generation immigrants and natives is caused by a skill gap rather than ethnic discrimination. Since, in principle, every male Swedish citizen takes the test when turning 18, we are able to...

A large empirical literature documents a rise in wage inequality in the American economy. It is silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to greater heterogeneity in the components of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greater uncertainty faced by agents....