While much empirical research exists on labor market consequences of unemployment benefits, there is remarkably little evidence on the forces determining benefits. We present a simple model where workers desire insurance against unemployment risk and benefits increase the unemployment rate. We...

We show that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970s to the 1990s. Happiness...

Beliefs are one component of culture. Data from the World Values Survey is available on a subset of beliefs concerning (broadly) meritocracy and poverty that appear relevant for economics. We document how they vary as well as their distribution across countries. We then correlate these measures...

This paper uses newly available data to describe the distribution of crime victimization and other criminal activities (including drug trafficking and corruption) around the world. The paper then documents a negative (positive) correlation between measures of criminal activity and happiness and...

We find that perceptions of crime and individual experience with crime (crime victimization) are positively correlated with left-wing beliefs within countries, controlling for income and other correlates of ideology, in a sample for Latin American countries in the mid-1990's.

We use a new approach to study questions in political economy that relies on data on the subjective well-being of a large sample of people living in the OECD over the period 1975-1992. Controlling for the personal characteristics of the respondents, year and country fixed effects and...