Critics of Lula’s administration argue that business has greatest weight in setting its priorities and that anti-poverty programmes based on conditional cash transfers have little long-term structural impact on social inequality. Yet the coherence and scope of these programmes is now an order...

Brazilian slums and squatter settlements have acquired a generally unattractive public image that often obscures differences between peripheral urban situations. Based on research in a socially stigmatised neighbourhood of the city of Salvador, Bahia, this paper begins with a broad structural...

Estimates are produced for differences between the ceteris paribus earnings of union and non-union workers in the UK and the US over time.

Many observers believe that times are growing harder for young people in Western society. This paper looks at the evidence and finds that conventional wisdom appears to be wrong.

This paper analyses the impact of cost competitiveness and technology on export performance using a very rich panel datset of 12 manufacturing industries in 14 OECD countries for the period between 1970 and 1992.

If a nation's economic performance improves, how much extra happiness does that buy its citizens? Most public debate assume -without real evidence- that the answer is a lot. This paper examines the question by using information on the well-being in Western countries.

A large literature in macroeconomics assumes a social objective function, W(pi,U), where inflation, pi, and unemployment, U, are bads. This paper provides some of the first formal evidence for such an approach. It issues data on the reported well-being levels of approximately one quarter of a...

There has been a dramatic surge in Islamic participation and values since the 1970s.  We propose a theory of the contemporary Islamic revival based upon two forms of relative deprivation - envy and unfulfilled aspirations.  To analyze these motivations, a behavioral model of religion is...