Andrew Oswald

The first area—stemming from his 1980 Oxford doctorate—was how to write down mathematical models of trade union behaviour. In the late 1970s, such research was unconventional. 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. It included a 1982 paper, in The Economic Journal, which was the first to propose the idea of the ‘utilitarian’ trade union model. Later in the 1980s, he worked on theoretical aspects of labour contracts, with papers in the 1986 American Economic Review and the 1984 Quarterly Journal of Economics. 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. This documented the discovery of a power law—with an exponent of approximately −0.1—linking wages to the local unemployment rate. Unusually for that era, it used data on 5 million randomly sampled workers around the world; this book went on to win Princeton's Lester Prize. Replications of the wage-curve finding have been found in a large number of nations. His other research on wage formation demonstrated the importance of rent-sharing in the labour market (Quarterly Journal of Economics 1992, Quarterly Journal of Economics 1996); it included it an Oxford University Press book co-authored with Alan Carruth. The fourth strand of work was on entrepreneurship. This led in particular to a 1998 paper, with David Blanchflower, in the Journal of Labor Economics with the title "What makes an entrepreneur?".[5] This has become a principal reference in university and business-school courses. It is the most-cited paper of all time in JOLE. (source: Thomson Reuters Web of Science Database, 2013) Other work was on the idea that high rates of home ownership lead to a high rate of unemployment (in the 1997 Journal of Economic Perspectives) and that oil price shocks are a key driver of movements in unemployment (in the 1998 Review of Economics and Statistics).

The final theme is what is now called the economics of happiness. This was thought the most unusual work of all—insofar as anyone paid attention—by economists in the early 1990s when the work began. The research proposed ways to estimate 'happiness' and job-satisfaction regression equations. Today the area is one of the fastest growing within social science. Andrew Oswald's papers include articles in the 1994 and 1997 Economic Journal, the 1996 Journal of Public Economics, the 2001 American Economic Review, the 2002 International Journal of Epidemiology, and the 2004 Journal of Public Economics. According to www.repec.org some of these are among the most-quoted writings in modern economics. 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. Oswald has also worked on the beneficial influence of a fruit-and-vegetable diet on happiness[8] and psychological health, in articles in Social Indicators Research in 2013 and the American Journal of Public Health in 2016.

Oswald has questioned the dominance of GDP in progress measurement, and said "Feelings data will dominate data collection in our world in the very long run."[9]

In April 2020, Oswald released a paper, jointly written with Nattavudh Powdthavee, on the idea that the young cohort of workers could be released first from the coronavirus crisis ‘lockdown’ of 2020.[10] This led to public debate and publicity in newspapers such as the Financial Times.[11]