This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional lossesare from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death ofa child; the third-worst is the death of a parent...

This paper documents some of the patterns in modern microeconomic data on youngpeople´s employment, attitudes and entrepreneurial behaviour. Among other sources, thepaper uses the Eurobarometer Surveys; the Labour Force Surveys from Canada and theCurrent Population Survey in the United States...

We collect data on the movement and productivity of elite scientists. Their mobility is remarkable: nearly half of the world's most-cited physicists work outside their country of birth. We show they migrate systematically towards nations with large Ramp;D spending. Our study cannot adjudicate on...

Is affluence a good thing? The book The Challenge of Affluence by Avner Offer (2006) argues that economic prosperity weakens self-control and undermines human well-being. Consistent with a pessimistic view, we show that psychological distress has been rising through time in modern Great Britain....

This paper uses longitudinal data to explore whether greater job status makes a person healthier. Taking the evidence as a whole, promotees do not exhibit a health improvement after promotion. Instead the data suggest that workers with good health are more likely to be promoted. In the private...

In universities all over the world, hiring and promotion committees regularly hear the argument: this is important work because it is about to appear in prestigious journal X. Moreover, those who allocate levels of research funding, such as in the multi-billion pound Research Assessment Exercise...

If human beings care about their relative weight, a form of imitative obesity can emerge (in which people subconsciously keep up with the weight of the Joneses). Using Eurobarometer data on 29 countries, this paper provides cross-sectional evidence that overweight perceptions and dieting are...

The UK is 'locked down' because of coronavirus (COVID-19). No clear exit strategy currently exists. This paper suggests a possible way forward that combines elements from economics and epidemiology. The paper proposes as a policy a 'release' from lockdown of the young cohort of UK citizens aged...

Economists have proposed a variety of sophisticated climate-change interventions. But do our citizens care enough about climate change to enact such policies? This paper provides evidence that suggests they do not. Two kinds of findings are presented. Using data on 40,000 Europeans from the 2016...

Governments are becoming interested in the concept of human well-being and how truly to assess it. As an alternative to traditional economic measures, some nations have begun to collect information on citizens' happiness, life satisfaction, and other psychological scores. Yet how could such data...