Andrew Oswald

Andrew Oswald has published papers in scholarly journals across the fields of economics, social science, statistics, psychology, and epidemiology.

[editorializing] However, along with the important 1981 paper by McDonald and Solow in the American Economic Review, Oswald's work was to become standard in modern textbooks.

A 1993 paper in Labour Economics argued that last-in-first-out layoff rules means that union indifference curves are locally horizontal.

Then began a strand of empirical work on labour markets—particularly the then-unconventional book The Wage Curve[4] (with David Blanchflower), published by MIT Press in 1994.

Unusually for that era,[editorializing] it used data on 5 million randomly sampled workers around the world; this book went on to win Princeton's Lester Prize.

A paper in Science, co-authored with Steve Wu, in 2010,[6] showed that across the United States there is a match between subjective well-being scores and objective measures.

In 2012, Andrew Oswald published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA arguing that, like humans, great apes[7] have a tendency to U-shaped wellbeing through life.

His recent co-authors include Nick Powdthavee, author of The Happiness Equation, and the Warwick economists Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi.

He has also worked with Liam Graham on the theory of hedonic adaptation (in the 2010 Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization);[12] a key idea in their paper is that humans have a pool of psychic resources called by the authors 'hedonic capital'.

Oswald contributed to the BBC series The Happiness Formula, has written over 200 articles for newspapers and magazines, and given about 1000 broadcast-media interviews around the world.

In England he has contributed to public debate on many issues—including warning of a housing crash in newspaper articles in The Times in the middle of the 2000s, his writing in The Economist about the need for liberalized remuneration in UK universities, promulgating the case for higher taxes on fossil fuels and petrol, and arguing for a larger private-rental housing sector in the European nations as a way of helping the labour market.