David G. Blanchflower

David G. Blanchflower
Dartmouth College · Department of Economics

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258
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Publications

Publications (258)
Article
Full-text available
Using micro-data on six surveys–the Gallup World Poll 2005–2023, the U.S. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 1993–2022, Eurobarometer 1991–2022, the UK Covid Social Survey Panel, 2020–2022, the European Social Survey 2002–2020 and the IPSOS Happiness Survey 2018–2023 –we show individuals’ reports of subjective wellbeing in Europe declined...
Article
Using four cross-sectional data files for the United States and Europe we show that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have a substantial and significant apparent impact on subjective wellbeing in adulthood. These ACEs – which include death of a parent, parental separation or divorce, household financial difficulties, the prolonged absence of a p...
Article
Using four cross-sectional data files for the United States and Europe we show that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have a substantial and significant apparent impact on subjective wellbeing in adulthood. These ACEs –which include death of a parent, parental separation or divorce, household financial difficulties, the prolonged absence of a pa...
Article
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Given recent controversies about the existence of a gender wellbeing gap we revisit the issue estimating gender differences across 55 SWB metrics—37 positive affect and 18 negative affect—contained in 8 cross-country surveys from 167 countries across the world, two US surveys covering multiple years and a survey for Canada. We find women score more...
Article
Most economists maintain that the labour market in the USA (and elsewhere) is ‘tight’ because unemployment rates are low, and the Beveridge curve (the vacancies‐to‐unemployment ratio) is high. They infer from this that there is potential for wage‐push inflation. However, real wages fell rapidly in 2022, and prior to that, real wages had been stagna...
Article
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Using data across countries and over time, we show that women have worse mental health than men in negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used — anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger — and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep. Women are also less satisfied with many aspects of the...
Article
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Combining data on around four million respondents from the Gallup World Poll and the US Daily Tracker Poll we rank 164 countries, the 50 states of the United States and the District of Colombia on eight wellbeing measures. These are four positive wellbeing measures—life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested—and four negative wellbe...
Article
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Although yet to be clearly identified as a clinical condition, there is immense concern at the health and wellbeing consequences of long COVID. Using data collected from nearly half a million Americans in the period June 2022-December 2022 in the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS), we find 14 percent reported suffering long COVID at so...
Article
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Central bankers are raising interest rates on the assumption that wage-push inflation may lead to stagflation. This is not the case. Although unemployment is low, the labour market is not ‘tight.’ On the contrary, we show that what matters for wage growth are the non-employment rate and the under-employment rate. Both are high and act as brakes on...
Article
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This article is a response to a piece in this journal, by David Bartram, which questions the validity of a vast literature establishing consistently a U-shaped relationship between age and happiness. There are 618 published studies that find U-shapes in that relationship in 145 countries, and only a handful that do not. Of the 30 countries that Bar...
Article
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Most studies tracking wellbeing do not collect data across all the months in a year. This leads to error in estimating gender differences in wellbeing for three reasons. First, there are seasonal patterns in wellbeing (particularly life satisfaction and happiness) which are gendered, so failure to account for those confounds estimates of gender dif...
Article
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Using data from all those born in a single week in 1958 in Britain we track associations between short pain and chronic pain in mid-life (age 44) and subsequent health, wellbeing and labor market outcomes in later life. We focus on data taken at age 50 in 2008, when the Great Recession hit and then five years later at age 55 in 2013 and again at ag...
Article
We revisit the well-known negative association between unionization and workers’ job satisfaction in the United States, first identified over forty years ago. We find the association has disappeared since the Great Recession. The job satisfaction of both younger and older union workers in the National Longitudinal Surveys of 1979 and 1997 no longer...
Article
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We examine the relationship between union membership and job satisfaction over the life‐course using data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) tracking all those born in Great Britain in a single week in March in 1958 through to age 55 (2013). We find there is a significant negative correlation between union membership and job satisfact...
Article
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The cross-sectional association between pain and unemployment is well-established. But the absence of panel data containing information on pain and labor market status has meant that less is known about the direction of any causal linkage. Those longitudinal studies that do examine the link between pain and subsequent labor market transitions sugge...
Article
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We show consumer expectations indices from the Conference Board and the University of Michigan predict unemployment upticks in the USA up to 18 months in advance, both at national and at state level. These data predict six of the last six recessions called by the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee 6–18 months before the date of recession. The con...
Article
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Using 44 sweeps of the US Census Household Pulse Survey data for the period April 2020 to April 22 we track the evolution of the mental health of just over three million Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find anxiety, depression and worry had two major peaks in 2020 but improved in 2021 and 2022. We show that a variable we construct based...
Article
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Over ten million Native Americans live in the USA today, but their experiences are often obscured in empirical research. While the rise in despair, or chronic distress, among White Americans is much discussed, what is not discussed is what has happened for the first Americans. We demonstrate that levels of consistently poor mental health were highe...
Article
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A number of studies—including our own—find a mid-life dip in well-being. Yet several papers in the psychology literature claim that the evidence of a U-shape is "overblown" and if there is such a thing that any such decline is "trivial". Others have claimed that the evidence of a U-shape "is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed," or...
Article
A growing literature identifies associations between subjective and biometric indicators of wellbeing. These associations, together with the ability of subjective wellbeing metrics to predict health and behavioral outcomes, have spawned increasing interest in wellbeing as an important concept in its own right. However, some social scientists contin...
Article
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We examine the start date of the Great Recession across OECD countries. The Sahm Rule identifies the start of recession in the US to the beginning of 2008 but in most other OECD countries it identifies the start after that identified by two successive falls in quarterly GDP. We establish our own rule for predicting recession using the fear of unemp...
Article
Kassenboehmer and Haisken-DeNew (2012) claim that there is no well-being midlife low in Germany, when controlling for fixed effects, respondent experience and interviewer characteristics in the German Socio-Economic Panel, 1994-2006. We re-estimate with a longer run of years using their methods and find that well-being declines to a low in midlife...
Article
Full-text available
A recent paper showed that, whereas we expect pain to rise with age due to accumulated injury, physical wear and tear, and disease, the elderly in America report less pain than those in midlife. Further exploration revealed this pattern was confined to the less educated. The authors called this the ‘mystery of American pain’ since pain appears to r...
Article
We write in response to an article recently published in this journal The U Shape of Happiness Across the Life Course: Expanding the Discussion, by Galambos, Krahn, Johnson and Lachman. The authors claim: “support for the purported U shape is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed” and “we believe the conclusion that happiness declines...
Article
A number of studies—including our own—find a mid-life dip in well-being. Yet several papers in the psychology literature claim that the evidence of a U-shape is "overblown" and if there is such a thing that any such decline is "trivial". Others have claimed that the evidence of a U-shape "is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed,"...
Article
Full-text available
Kassenboehmer and DeNew (2012) claim that there is no well-being age U-shape effect for Germany, when controlling for fixed effects and respondent experience and interviewer characteristics in the German Socio-Economic Panel, 1994-2006. We re-estimate with a longer run of years and restrict the age of respondents to those under seventy and find t...
Article
A number of studies - including our own - find a mid-life dip in well-being. Yet several papers in the psychology literature claim that the evidence of a U-shape is "overblown" and if there is such a thing that any such decline is "trivial". Others have claimed that the evidence of a U-shape "is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed,"...
Article
Full-text available
Using data on nearly 2 million respondents from the United States and Europe, we show the partial correlation between union membership and employee job satisfaction is positive and statistically significant. This runs counter to findings in the seminal work of Freeman and Borjas in the 1970s. For the United States, we show the association between u...
Article
Using data for over 2.5 million individuals in the United States over the period 2006-2019 from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey series we show the unemployed suffer sleep disruption. The unemployed suffer more short and long sleep than the employed and are more likely to suffer from disturbed sleep. These are especiall...
Article
Full-text available
We examine well‐being in Scotland using micro data from the Scottish Health Survey and the UK Annual Population Surveys. We find evidence of a midlife nadir or zenith in Scotland in well‐being at around age fifty using a variety of measures of both happiness and unhappiness. We confirm that higher consumption of fruit and vegetables is associated w...
Article
The cross-sectional association between pain and unemployment is well-established. But the absence of panel data containing data on pain and labor market status has meant less is known about the direction of any causal linkage. Those longitudinal studies that do examine the link between pain and subsequent labor market transitions suggest results a...
Article
Full-text available
A large empirical literature has debated the existence of a U-shaped happiness-age curve. This paper re-examines the relationship between various measures of well-being and age in 145 countries, including 109 developing countries, controlling for education and marital and labor force status, among others, on samples of individuals under the age of...
Article
Using data from 68 countries on over eight million respondents over 40 years we show union membership peaks in midlife — usually around workers’ late 40s or early 50s. In doing so we extend Blanchflower's earlier study, incorporating a further 39 countries and another decade or so of data. We show the age peak in union membership is apparent across...
Preprint
Full-text available
The past decade has brought increasing concern, in countries all over the world, of declines in mental health and well-being. Across countries, chronic depression and suicide rates peak in midlife. In the U.S., deaths of despair are most likely to occur in these years, and the patterns are robustly associated with unhappiness and stress. There is a...
Article
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Objectives. To investigate changes from 1993 to 2019 in the percentage of US citizens suffering extreme distress. Methods. Using data on 8.1 million randomly sampled US citizens, we created a new proxy measure for exceptional distress (the percentage who reported major mental and emotional problems in all 30 of the last 30 days). We examined time t...
Article
We examine labour market performance in the US and the UK prior to the onset of the Covid-19 crash. We then track the changes that have occurred in the months and days from the beginning of March 2020 using what we call the Economics of Walking About (EWA) that shows a collapse twenty times faster and much deeper than the Great Recession. We examin...
Article
I examine the relationship between unhappiness and age using data from eight well-being data files on nearly fourteen million respondents across forty European countries and the United States and 168 countries from the Gallup World Poll. I use twenty different individual characterizations of unhappiness including many not good mental health days; a...
Preprint
Full-text available
A number of studies – including our own – find a mid-life dip in well-being. We review a psychology literature that claims that the evidence of a U-shape is "overblown" and if there is such a decline it is "trivial". We find remarkably strong and consistent evidence across countries and US states that statistically significant U-shapes exist with a...
Article
Using data for over 2.5 million individuals in the United States over the period 2006-2019 from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey series we show the unemployed suffer sleep disruption. The unemployed suffer more short and long sleep than the employed and are more likely to suffer from disturbed sleep. These are especiall...
Article
The authors produce estimates for a new and better rate of underemployment for 25 countries using the European Labor Force Survey that is based on workers’ reports of their preferred hours at the going wage. Both voluntary and involuntary part-time workers report they want more hours. Full-time workers who say they want to change their hours, mostl...
Chapter
Full-text available
Using seven recent data sets, covering 51 countries and 1.3 million randomly sampled people, the paper examines the pattern of psychological well-being from approximately age 20 to age 90. Two conceptual approaches to this issue are possible. Despite what has been argued in the literature, neither is the ‘correct’ one, because they measure differen...
Article
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Abstract In Happiness for All?, Carol Graham raises disquieting ideas about today’s United States. The challenge she puts forward is an important one. Here we review the intellectual case and offer additional evidence. We conclude broadly on the author’s side. Strikingly, Americans appear to be in greater pain than citizens of other countries, and...
Article
In this paper we build on our earlier work on underemployment using data from the UK. We focus on the effects on well-being of worker dissatisfaction with hours of work. We make use of five main measures of well-being: happiness; life satisfaction; whether life is worthwhile; anxiety and depression. The more that actual hours differ from preferred...
Article
In this note, we argue that a considerable part of the explanation for the benign wage growth in the advanced world is the rise in underemployment. In the years after 2008 the unemployment rate understates labour market slack. Underemployment is more important than unemployment in explaining the weakness of wage growth in the UK. The Phillips curve...
Article
In this note, we focus on underemployment as a potential cause of lower wage growth, which itself may have deeper causes, but which has, we would argue, demonstrably changed since the 2008 recession. The gap between our measures of the number of additional hours required by those who want more hours and the number who want less has narrowed recentl...
Article
Full-text available
Using seven recent data sets, covering 51 countries and 1.3 million randomly sampled people, the paper examines the pattern of psychological well-being from approximately age 20 to age 90. Two conceptual approaches to this issue are possible. Despite what has been argued in the literature, neither is the 'correct' one, because they measure differen...
Article
A growing literature argues that mental well-being follows an approximate U-shape through life. Yet in the eyes of some scholars this evidence remains controversial. The reason is that it relies on people’s answers to ‘happiness’ surveys. The present paper explores a different approach. It examines modern data on the use of antidepressant pills (as...
Article
We present evidence showing that in advanced countries there has been a rise in both youth unemployment, a decline in youth employment, alongside as a rise in underemployment for those youngsters lucky enough to have a job. We also document marked differences across countries in the size of the youth cohort, which in most western countries rose by...
Article
A historically high level of youth unemployment presents Greece with a huge social and economic challenge. This paper analyses various dimensions of this challenge. We argue that though the conventional definition of “youth” is the 16-24 age group, there is a strong case for considering 25 to 29-year-olds as sharing common problems with conventiona...
Article
Unemployment and inflation lower well-being. The macroeconomist Arthur Okun characterized the negative effects of unemployment and inflation by the misery index—the sum of the unemployment and inflation rates. This paper makes use of a large European data set, covering the period 1975–2013, to estimate happiness equations in which an individual sub...
Article
This paper examines the amount of slack in the UK labor market. It examines the downward adjustments made by the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to both unemployment and underemployment, which in our view are invalid. Without any evidence the MPC in its assessment of the output gap reduces the level of unemployment because of its claim that long-te...
Article
In this paper we examine the impact of rises in inactivity on wages in the US economy and find evidence of a statistically significant negative effect. These nonparticipants exert additional downward pressure on wages over and above the impact of the unemployment rate itself. This pattern holds across recent decades in the US data, and the relation...
Article
The authors explore the hypothesis that high home-ownership damages the labor market. The results are relevant to, and may be worrying for, a range of policymakers and researchers. The authors find that rises in the home-ownership rate in a US state are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in unemployment in that state. The elasticity exceeds unity:...
Article
This paper addresses the issue of underemployment in the UK labour market – the demand for hours of work is less than workers’ willingness to supply extra hours. Workers would like to work more hours, but there is insufficient product demand to justify additional hours. This phenomenon has been evident in the UK labour market for some time, but has...
Article
This paper addresses the issue of underemployment in the UK labour market – the demand for hours of work is less than workers’ willingness to supply extra hours. Workers would like to work more hours, but there is insufficient product demand to justify additional hours. This phenomenon has been evident in the UK labour market for some time, but has...
Article
Full-text available
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 rise in an approximately dose-response way with the nu...
Article
Full-text available
Some researchers suggest that human well-being is U-shaped through our lives. If it exists, such a curve could be classified as a truly fundamental discovery about humans. Yet sceptics point to the difficulty of relying on questions in which people are asked to describe subjective feelings – and the result is then an impasse. This paper suggests a...
Article
Full-text available
Most economists are not familiar with so-called biomarker data. We attempt here to provide an introduction to such data and to describe the econometric structure of simple biomarker equations. We draw upon information on the heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, fibrinogen, and C-reactive protein levels of 100,000 adults. We show that...

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