Once called the "dismal science," economics now offers prescriptions for improving people's happiness. In this book Richard Easterlin, the "father of happiness economics," draws on a half-century of his own research and that conducted by fellow economists and psychologists to answer in plain...

This book presents a panoramic view of the implications from Richard Easterlin's groundbreaking work on happiness and economics. Contributions in the book show the relevance of the Easterlin Paradox to main areas, such as the relationship between income and happiness, the relationship between...

I consider a model where a principal decides whether to produce one unit of an indivisible good (e.g. a private school) and which characteristics it will contain (emphasis on language or science). Agents (parents) are differentiated along two substitutable dimensions: a vertical parameter that...

This paper provides a synthesis and further development of a global modelling approach introduced in Pesaran, Schuermann andWeiner (2004), where country specific models in the form of VARX* structures are estimated relating a vector of domestic variables, xit, to their foreign counterparts, xit,...

Regulation of the employment contract is both wide spread and diverse. The diversity of regulation is surprising because it suggests that there is little consensus regarding optimal intervention into the labor market. This paper discusses several economic reasons why it may be efficient for...

This paper develops a new efficient estimator for the average treatment effect, if selection for treatment is on observables. The new estimator is linear in the first-stage nonparametric estimator. This simplifies the derivation of the means squared error (MSE) of the estimator as a function of...

We explain the proliferation of panel data studies in terms of (i) data availability, (ii) the more heightened capacity for modeling the complexity of human behavior than a single cross-section or time series data can possibly allow, and (iii) challenging methodology. Advantages and issues of...

The U.S. economic development in the nineteenth century was characterized by the westward movement of population and the accumulation of productive land in the West. This paper presents a model of migration and land improvement to identify the quantitatively important forces driving this...

Among the rich economies of the world today, per capita output levels had diverged before converging to the per capita output level of the frontier economy. Since frontier economies have grown at stable rates, non-frontier economies display an S-shape aggregate transition path. Along this...

We analyze an agency model where one individual decides how much evidence he collects. We assume that he has free access to information, but all the news acquired become automatically public. Conditional on the information disclosed, a second individual with conflicting preferences undertakes an...