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 short paper collects and studies the CVs of 112 assistant professors in the top-ten American departments of economics. The paper treats these as a glimpse of the future. We find evidence of a strong brain drain. We find also a predominance of empirical work.

There are signs – one is world university league tables – that people increasingly think globally when choosing the university in which they wish to work and study. This paper is an exploration of data on the international brain drain. We study highly-cited physicists, highly-cited...

In this interview, which was recorded in 2007 to celebrate the receipt of an honorary doctorate from Warwick University, Avinash Dixit of Princeton University discusses why he is an economist and how he approaches economic research. He argues, among other things, for doing what you enjoy rather...

Nearly all post-war recessions have been preceded by oil-price shocks, but is this because spikes in the price of petroleum cause economic downturns? Most research has ignored an identification problem : oil prices and the state of the world economy are endogenously determined. This paper uses...

This paper argues -- in line with the proposals of the recent Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress -- that we should now be measuring a nation’s emotional prosperity rather than its economic prosperity (that is, we ought to focus on the level of...

I suggest the idea of a reporting function, r(.), from reality to feelings. The ‘happiness’ literature claims we have demonstrated diminishing marginal utility of income. I show not, and that knowing r(.)’s curvature is crucial. A quasi-experiment on heights is studied.

This paper examines an accumulating modern literature on the health benefits of relationships like marriage. Although much remains to be understood about the physiological channels, we draw the judgment, after looking across many journals and disciplines, that there is persuasive longitudinal...

This paper studies a model of diffusion in a fixed, finite connected network. There is an interested party that knows the quality of the product or idea being propagated and chooses an implant in the network to influence other agents to buy or adopt. Agents are either “innovators”, who adopt...