Welfare and well-being have traditionally been gauged by using income and employment statistics, life expectancy, and other objective measures. The Economics of Happiness, which is based on people's reports of how their lives are going, provides a complementary yet radically different approach...

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shanghai implemented lockdown measures to stop transmission of the virus. Over 26 million residents, including 0.8 million children aged 3-6, were confined at home. This study leveraged a city-wide cohort of preschool children - the Shanghai...

The present research provides evidence on the determinants driving the differences in the unemployment-output relationship in Spanish regions. We followed a two-step approach. First, we estimated a set of time-varying Okun’s coefficients (rolling-window) for the autonomous communities in Spain...

The growth of novel flexible work formats raises a number of questions about their effects upon health and the potential public policy implications. However, answering these questions is hampered by data and identification constraints. This is the first paper that draws on comprehensive...

Drawing upon theoretical insights from the Job Demand-Control model, which links occupational characteristics to health, this paper provides the first causal evidence of the physical and mental health consequences of self-employment. Specifically, I utilize German longitudinal data for the...

The paper investigates whether self-employment represents a way to reduce overeducation and improve labour market matching, in a comparative analysis between immigrants and natives. Using the EU Labour Force Survey for the year 2012, and controlling for a list of demographic characteristics and...

This paper investigates the causal effects of agglomeration on hours worked by the self-employed. The IV estimations instrument for urbanization and localization using the minimum distance from the work Public Use Microdata Area centroid to the United States' coastlines and estimated industry...

This paper explores the commuting behavior of workers in Western European countries, with a focus on the differences in commuting time between employees and the self-employed in these countries. Using data from the last wave of the European Working Conditions Survey (2015), we analyze the...

Using the Canadian Labour Force Survey, we document the short-term impact of COVID-19 on self-employed individuals in Canada, which we interpret as small business owners. We document an important decrease in business ownership between February 2020 and May 2020 (-14.8 percent for incorporated...