This paper is a continuation of results in Blanchflower and Oswald (2008). It provides new evidence that well-being follows a curve through life. We use data on half a million randomly sampled individuals across eight major European nations. Importantly, we show that in this set of countries...

Although there exists a large literature on the effects of trade unions upon wages, there is no published work that uses microeconomic data to examine the employment consequences of unionization. The paper addresses this issue with a new British data set and shows that, even after the addition...

The paper provides evidence for the existence of a negatively sloped locus linking the level of pay to the rate of regional (or industry) unemployment. This "wage curve" is estimated using microeconomic data for Britain, the US, Canada, Korea, Austria, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Norway, and...

If human beings care about their relative weight, a form of imitative obesity can emerge (in which people subconsciously keep up with the weight of the Joneses). Using Eurobarometer data on 29 countries, this paper provides cross-sectional evidence that overweight perceptions and dieting are...

The Wage Curve casts doubt on some of the most important ideas in macroeconomics, labor economics, and regional economics. According to macroeconomic orthodoxy, there is a relationship between unemployment and the rate of change of wages. According to orthodoxy in labor economics and regional...

Scientific-funding bodies are increasingly under pressure to use journal rankings to measure research quality. Hiring and promotion committees routinely hear an equivalent argument: 'this is important work because it is to be published in prestigious journal X'. But how persuasive is such an...

"The paper is an attempt to test whether there is a wage curve in western Germany and if so whether it might be explained by efficiency-wage forces. Such a theory makes two predictions. First, where the degree of supervision is low, wages will be high. Second, where the degree of supervision is...

We present evidence that psychological well-being is U-shaped through life. A difficulty with research on this issue is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). First, using data on 500,000 randomly...