Air pollution results in high economic costs arising from its negative impacts on human health, especially in urban areas. Driving restriction policies such as low emission zones (LEZs) are designed to improve air quality. Indeed, empirical analyses in this Weekly Report confirm that LEZs reduce...

Losing a partner is a life-changing experience. We draw on numerous datasets to examine differences between widowed and partnered older women and to provide a comprehensive picture of well-being in widowhood. Most importantly, our analysis accounts for time use in widowhood, an aspect which has...

In response to the Covid 19 health crisis, the French government has imposed various measures, referred to as social-distancing measures, including a lockdown with the primary objective of reducing face-to-face interactions between people in order to limit the spread of the virus. This paper...

Korea is a top player in emerging digital technologies, with an outstanding digital infrastructure and a dynamic ICT sector. The COVID-19 outbreak highlighted the importance of digitalisation to contain the spread of the virus, by allowing quick testing and tracing of infected people, and...

A growing literature concludes that terrorism impacts the economy, yet less is known about its impact on utility. This paper estimates the impact of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing on well-being, by exploiting representative U.S. daily data. Using both a regression discontinuity and an event...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments to implement lockdowns. While lockdowns may help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to population well-being. We use Google Trends data to test whether the lockdowns implemented in Europe and America led to...

This paper combines several large-scale surveys with different identification strategies to shed new light on the determinants of cooperative behavior. We provide evidence indicating that the well-being maximizing level of trust is above the income maximizing level. Higher trust is also linked...

Using a large-scale panel data set, we trace the evolution of incomes and well-being around the entry into 'solo self-employment' - that is, running a business without employees. We find that solo self-employment is used to self-insure against employment shocks: employment rates fall and poverty...

Despite political efforts, balancing work and family life is still challenging. This paper provides novel evidence on the effect of firm level interventions that seek to reduce the work-life conflict. The focus is on how a specific workplace policy, namely childcare support, affects the...

A growing literature has tried to measure the extent to which individuals have equal opportunities to acquire income. At the same time, policy makers have doubled down on efforts to go beyond income when measuring well- being. We attempt to bridge these two areas by measuring the extent to which...