There is no significant relationship between the improvement in happiness and the long term rate of growth of GDP per capita. This is true for three groups of countries analyzed separately - 17 developed, 9 developing, and 11 transition - and also for the 37 countries taken together. Time series...

International migration of people is a momentous and complex phenomenon. Research on its causes and consequences, requires sufficient data. While some datasets are available, the nature of migration complicates their scientific use. Virtually no existing dataset captures international migration...

Higher education, like any other commodity or service, has been viewed in a variety of economic frameworks. Little of this work, however, appears to have made any effort to define carefully the boundaries of the relevant market for higher education, which is the subject of this particular...

In this paper we explore the relationship between the individual decision to become an entrepreneur and the institutional context. We pinpoint the critical roles of property rights and the size of the state sector for entrepreneurial activity and test the relationships empirically by combining...

It has been known for centuries that the rich and famous have longer lives than the poor and ordinary. Causality, however, remains trenchantly debated. The ideal experiment would be one in which status and money could somehow be dropped upon a sub-sample of individuals while those in a control...

Recent changes in information and communication technologies (ICT) have contributed to a dramatic increase in the integration and interdependence of countries, markets and people. This paper focuses on an increasingly important aspect of globalization, the international movement of people, with...

This paper uses nonparametric kernel methods to construct observation-specific elasticities of substitution for a balanced panel of 73 developed and developing countries to examine the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis. The exercise shows some support for capital-skill complementarity,...

In this paper we use a panel of 189 countries to describe the salient trends that have emerged in national personal income tax systems spanning the twenty five year period from 1981 to 2005. Using complete national income tax schedules, we calculate actual average and marginal tax rates at...

This paper compares the impact of institutions on individual decisions to become entrepreneurs in the form of new business start ups by males and females across 44 developed and developing economies between 1998 and 2004. We test four hypotheses; that women are less likely to undertake...