This paper provides an explanation for five stylized facts concerning growth and structural change in the developed economies: (i) the rising share of service employment; (ii) the increase in the female employment rate; (iii) the deceleration of this increase while approaching the male employment...

Many empirical studies show the paradoxical fact that service output in proportion to industrial output does not tend to decline, in spite of rising service prices. Baumol's "cost disease" model well explains rising service prices, but it simply assumes that the output proportion remains...

Most popular explanations of the happiness paradox cannot fully account for the lack of growth in U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years (Blanchflower and Oswald (2004)). In this paper we test an alternative hypothesis, namely that the decline in U.S. social capital is responsible...

Most popular explanations cannot fully account for the declining trend of U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years. We test the hypothesis that the relationship between social capital and happiness at the individual level accounts for what is left unexplained by previous research....

Self-reported life satisfaction (SRS) in Italy has started to decline well before the current crisis. This paper explores the relationship between SRS and quality of life in Italy, using the ISAE data-base on households. SRS was surveyed on 2000 individuals in May 2008, November 2008 and April...

During the most recent decades people in the US have reported both a stagnant or even declining subjective well-being, as Easterlin (Easterlin, R.A., 1974. Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence. In: David, P.A., Melvin, W.R. (Eds.), Nations and Households in...