"If you read just one book about economics, make it Andrew Leigh's clear, insightful, and remarkable (and short) work." -Claudia Goldin, recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics and Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University A sweeping, engrossing history of how economic forces...

In Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia, Blanchflower and Oswald (2005) observe an apparent puzzle: they claim that Australia ranks highly in the Human Development Index (HDI), but relatively poorly in happiness. However, when we compare their happiness data with...

Does faster economic growth increase pressure for democratic change, or reduce it? Using data for 154 countries for the period 1963-2007, we examine the short-run relationship between economic growth and moves toward and away from greater democracy. To address the potential endogeneity of...