The standard of living in the industrialized nations has been steadily increasing over the last few decades. Yet some observers wonder whether we are really getting any happier. This paper addresses that question by examining well-being data on 100,000 randomly sampled Americans and Britons from...

This paper documents some of the patterns in modern microeconomic data on young people’s employment, attitudes and entrepreneurial behaviour. Among other sources, the paper uses the Eurobarometer Surveys; the Labour Force Surveys from Canada and the Current Population Survey in the United...

We explore the idea that happiness and psychological well-being are U-shaped in age. The main difficulty with this argument is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). First, using data on 500,000...