According to the well-being measure known as the U.N. Human Development Index, Australia now ranks 3rd in the world and higher than all other English-speaking nations. This paper questions that assessment. It reviews work on the economics of happiness, considers implications for policymakers,...

In this speech, Professor David Blanchflower, member of the Monetary Policy Committee, discusses the origins of the most recent influx of migrants to the United Kingdom. He also examines why the East of England has received a disproportionate number of these new workers and why employers choose...

In this speech, Professor David Blanchflower, member of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), looks at the impact on the UK economy of the recent wave of migration from Eastern Europe, following the accession of ten new countries to the EU. He estimates that on aggregate, the inflow of workers...

In this paper I examine changes in self-employment that have occurred since the early 1980s in the United States. It is a companion paper to a recent equivalent paper relating to the UK. Data on random samples of twenty million US workers are examined taken from the Basic Monthly files of the...

The authors investigate processes of job creation and job destruction in Britain, using data from the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984, and 1990. They find that rates of employment growth, job creation, job destruction, and job reallocation (the sum of job creation and job...

Increased product market competition should affect outcomes in labour and product markets, and one of the key premises of standard economic theory is that, all other things held constant, prices should be lower and efficiency enhanced by more competition. In this paper we directly test this...

Following Phillip's original work on the UK, applied researchon 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...