It is widely recognised that one of the greatest economic problems facing developed countries is unemployment. An example of this recognition is the recent reports by the OECD ("The OECD Jobs Study", 1994) on unemployment, its causes and possible policies. One issue that is closely associated...

This paper compares changes in the structure if wages in France, Great Britain, Japan and the United States over the last twenty years. Wage differentials by education and occupation (skill differentials) narrowed substantially in all four countries in the 1970s. Overall wage inequality and...

That greater product market competition has the potential to affect outcomes in labour and product markets is borne out one by one of the key premises of standard economic theory which predicts that, all other things held constant, prices should be lower and efficiency enhanced by more...

This paper examines the impact of trade unions in the US and the UK and elsewhere. In both the US and the UK, despite declining membership numbers, unions are able to raise wages substantially over the equivalent non-union wage. Unions in other countries, such as Australia, Austria, Brazil,...

This paper considers the issue of unemployment one of the most pressing issues facingthe UK and other governments, as the current recessions deepens. It begins by trying toaccurately date the beginning of the current downturn in the British economy, arguingthat it is clear that the recession...

Background Life events?like illness, marriage, or unemployment?have important effects on people. But there is no accepted way to measure the different sizes of these events upon human happiness and psychological health. By using happiness regression equations, economists have recently developed...

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 1970's to the 1990's. Happiness...

Governments try to discourage risky health behaviours, yet such behaviours are bewilderingly persistent. We suggest a new conceptual approach to this puzzle. We show that expected utility theory predicts that unhappy people will be attracted to risk-taking. Using US seatbelt data, we document...

The question of whether there is a connection between income and psychological well-being is a long-studied issue across the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences. Much research has found that richer people tend to be happier. However, relatively little attention has been paid to...