We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking). Lottery winnings allow us to make causal statements regarding the effect...

Do people form correct expectations about the impact of retirement on their health? This paper looks at unexpected health shocks that hit people after they retire. Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (waves 2001-2014), we construct measures of unexpected...

We examine the extent to which recent declines in child mortality and fertility in Sub- Saharan Africa can be attributed to insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs). Exploiting the rapid increase in ITNs since the mid-2000s, we employ a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to identify the...

This paper provides one of the first tests of adaptation to the complete set of residential transitions. We use long-run SOEP panel data and consider the impact of all housing transitions, whether or not they involve a change in housing tenure or geographical movement, on both life satisfaction...

Information on both earnings and non-pecuniary rewards is needed to understand the occupational dispersion of wellbeing. We analyse subjective wellbeing in a large UK sample to construct a measure of "full earnings", the sum of earnings and the value of non-pecuniary rewards, in 90 different...

We use British panel data to explore the link between occupational status and life satisfaction. We find puzzling evidence, for men, of a U-shaped relationship in cross-section data: employees in medium-status occupations report lower life satisfaction scores than that of employees in either...

We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender...

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it, and we here consider marriage as one potential source of this insurance. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by larger private firms when they...

We carry out a difference-in-differences analysis of a representative real-time survey conducted as part of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study and show that teleworking had a negative average effect on life satisfaction over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This average...

We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender...