Humans run on a fuel called food. Yet economists and other social scientists rarely study what people eat. We provide simple evidence consistent with the existence of a link between the consumption of fruit and vegetables and high well-being. In cross-sectional data, happiness and mental health...

This paper describes the findings from a new, and intrinsically interdisciplinary, literature on happiness and human well-being. The paper focuses on international evidence. We report the patterns in modern data; we discuss what has been persuasively established and what has not; we suggest paths...

If human beings care about their relative weight, a form of imitative obesity can emerge (in which people subconsciously keep up with the weight of the Joneses). Using Eurobarometer data on 29 countries, this paper provides cross-sectional evidence that overweight perceptions and dieting are...

A modern statistical literature argues that countries such as Denmark are particularly happy while nations like East Germany are not. Are such claims credible? The paper explores this by building on two ideas. The first is that psychological well-being and high blood-pressure are thought by...

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...

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. Using the U.S. General Social Surveys and the Eurobarometer Surveys, the paper studies the reported happiness and...

Following Phillip's original work on the UK, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper adopts a different...

The paper uses CPS data from 1964 to 1985 to test for the existence of rent-sharing in US tabor markets, Using an unbalanced panel from the manufacturing sector, and random-effects and fixed-effects specifications, the paper finds that changes in wages are explained by movements in lagged levels...

The paper provides evidence for the existence of a negatively sloped locus linking the level of pay to the rate of regional (or industry) unemployment. This "wage curve" is estimated using microeconomic data for Britain, the US, Canada, Korea, Austria, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Norway, and...

This paper estimates employment equations based on the traditional labour demand model and modern efficient bargain theory using data drawn from wage contracts signed in the Canadian private unionized sector between 1978 and 1984. Contrary to the labour demand model predictions, the alternative...