According to the well-being measure known as the U.N. Human Development Index, Australia now ranks 3rd in the world and higher than all other English-speaking nations. This paper questions that assessment. It reviews work on the economics of happiness, considers implications for policymakers,...

Following A. W. Phillips's (1958) original work on the United Kingdom, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper...

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

This paper estimates that, in 1984, 43 percent of British private sector establishments had some form of profit- related pay. Regression results do not show that these establishments had statistically-significant better financial performance. Cross-ta bulations do not suggest that the...

This paper describes the findings from a new, and intrinsically interdisciplinary, literature on happiness and human well-being. The paper focuses on international evidence. We report the patterns in modern data; we discuss what has been persuasively established and what has not; we suggest paths...

Antidepressants as a commodity have been remarkably little-studied by economists. This study shows in new data for 27 European countries that 8% of people (and 10% of those middle-aged) take antidepressants each year. The probability of antidepressant use is greatest among those who are...

This paper examines the pattern of self-employment in Australia and the United States. We particularly focus on the movement of young people in and out of self-employment using comparable longitudinal data from the two countries. We find that the forces that influence whether a person becomes...

The paper uses newly available cross-section data to study wage determination in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The main results are as follows: (1) fear of unemployment substantially depresses pay; (2) there is some evidence of a wage ratchet whereby rates of pay are more flexible upwards...

The paper provides evidence to show that many U.S. labor contracts havelittle or no private unemployment insurance provision. A model of an optional contract under asymmetric information, with no private unemployment insurance, is presented. Underemployment and involuntaryunemployment may...