Derbies between two teams from the same city or region catch more public attention than "normal'' soccer matches. Terms such as "Old Firm" (Rangers vs. Celtic), "Merseyside" (Liverpool FC vs. Everton FC), "Superclásico'' (Boca Juniors vs. River Plate), and "Revierderby" (Dortmund vs. Schalke)...

For policy reforms to increase a society's welfare, reliable information on people's preferences and expectations is crucial. Representative opinion polls, often involving simplifed questions about the complex topics under debate, are an important source of information for both policy-makers and...

We study the relationship between gerontocracy and aggregate economic performance in a simple model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation and productive government spending. We show that less patient lites display the tendency to underinvest in public education and productive...

Today's labor-scarce economies have open trade and closed immigration policies, while a century ago they had just the opposite, open immigration and closed trade policies. Why the inverse policy correlation, and why has it persisted for almost two centuries? This paper seeks answers to this dual...

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is...

This paper focuses on the problems involved in developing cross-country comparisons of the intergenerational stance of fiscal policy. Of course, these comparisons are nowadays based on the method of generational accounting and in particular most of them rely on comparing the total size of...

This paper examines the effects of recent welfare reforms in the US and UK on the well-being of children in low-income families, looking specifically at the effects on poverty, family expenditures, and child health and development. The paper finds some commonalities but also some notable...