It has been shown in the recent literature on widening participation that in England a disadvantaged pupil has as much a chance of attending a university as a more advantaged student, provided that s/he manages to reach a sufficient level of achievement at the secondary school level. This...

Little is known about why some human beings make risky life-choices. This paper provides evidence that people's health decisions and addictive actions are influenced by the gender of their children. Having a daughter leads individuals -- in micro data from Great Britain and the United States --...

Research on public goods mainly focuses its attention on the ability of incentives, beliefs and group structure to affect behaviour in social dilemma interactions. This paper investigates the pure effects of a rather subtle mechanism on social preferences in a one-shot linear public good game....

This paper presents evidence that an individual's self-assessed health (SAH) does not only suffer from systematic reporting bias and adaptation bias but is also biased owing to confounding social norm effects. Using 13 waves of the British Household Panel Survey, I am able to show that, while...

This paper studies how spouses' life satisfaction levels are correlated. Using the British Household Panel Survey, it tests whether the observed positive correlation in life satisfaction is due to assortative mating, shared social environment, or spillover effect of well-being between partners....

The current study uses a large British panel data set to examine the impact of disability, and the speed and extent of adaptation to disability, in seven domain satisfactions. Results show that the onset of a severe disability has the most detrimental impact on health, income, and social life in...

What determines human beings' political preferences? Using nationally representative longitudinal data, we show that having daughters makes people more likely to vote for left-wing political parties. Having sons leads people to favor right-wing parties. The paper checks that our result is not an...

This paper addresses the extent to which there is an intergenerational transmission of mental health and subjective well-being within families. Specifically it asks whether parents' own mental distress influences their child's life satisfaction, and vice versa. Whilst the evidence on daily...

This note investigates Schkade and Kahneman's (1998) maxim that "Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it". The paper shows that whilst becoming unemployed hurts psychologically, unemployment has a greater impact on happiness if the person also...