Many politicians believe they can intervene in the economy to improve people’s lives. But can they? In a social experiment carried out in the United Kingdom, extensive in-work support was randomly assigned among 16,000 disadvantaged people. We follow a sub-sample of 3,500 single parents for 5...

The causes of people’s political attitudes are largely unknown. We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing people before and after a lottery windfall, we show that winners tend to switch towards support for a right-wing political party and to become less...

There is a large amount of cross-sectional evidence for a midlife low in the life cycle of human happiness and well-being (a ‘U shape’). Yet no genuinely longitudinal inquiry has uncovered evidence for a U-shaped pattern. Thus some researchers believe the U is a statistical artefact. We...

Objective - Although human aging is characterized by loss of fertility and progressive decline in physical abilities, later life is associated with better psychological health and well-being. Furthermore, there has been an unprecedented increase in average lifespan over the past century without...

Is academic economics becoming increasingly divorced from reality? This paper studies the contents of full-length articles published in the Economic Journal between 1959 and 1990. It finds, contrary to what some believe, that there has been significant growth in empirical research on real firms,...

This paper constructs a model of trade-union behavior in which there is a distinction between "insiders" and "outsiders." This is used to examine one of the most troublesome issues in macroeconomic theory, namely, the extent to which a rise in aggregate demand might generate wage increases...