When the average income of a person’s reference group doubles, their spending on…
What you spend on designer bags and luxury cars reveals far less about your wealth than about who you're trying to impress.
Work & Money
Work, careers, companies and money: how organisations, incentives and markets shape the way people work, earn and decide.
134 articles · Work & Money
A Salary Finance study found that 39% of people earning more than $200,000 a year…
A 2023 survey found financial stress surprisingly far up the income ladder. The result reveals why salary, net worth and room for error are different measures.
Four in ten retirees leave work earlier than planned—and for more than two-thirds…
Retirement surveys repeatedly show that plans and actual exits diverge. Research suggests choice matters, but health, money, work and care remain intertwined.
Why losing a career identity can make retirement difficult
Retirement can expose how much structure, belonging and recognition a career supplied, but the evidence shows identity is only one part of adjustment.
The “Waiter Rule” became a famous hiring heuristic among executives: how someone…
The Waiter Rule became executive folklore because it tests respect across a power gap, but its origin and its usefulness in hiring are more complicated than the maxim suggests.
A seven-decade study of 717 people found that ambition predicted higher income…
A 717-person longitudinal analysis found ambition strongly predicted career outcomes, while its links with life satisfaction and mortality were tiny.
My dad retired last year and he’s the loneliest he’s ever been — not because he…
The workplace friendship is a peculiar thing: it dissolves the moment the thing that created it disappears.
When researchers examined return-to-office mandates across S&P 500 companies, they…
A study of 137 S&P 500 mandate firms found no significant financial lift, while Glassdoor ratings of satisfaction, work-life balance, leadership and culture declined.
Psychology says procrastination about retirement may be less about discipline than…
Research on future self-continuity suggests retirement delay can involve identity as well as discipline, though early face-ageing studies measured hypothetical choices.
Retirement planning is almost entirely about money, yet a meta-analysis of 94…
The spreadsheet matters less than the schedule: what makes retirement stick is not better math but specific plans for Tuesday afternoon.
Researchers studying leaderless groups found that the single strongest predictor…
In temporary leaderless groups, speaking time predicted who peers saw as the leader, but nomination and effective leadership are not the same.
Economists tracked US jobs from 1980 to 2012 and found the ones demanding social…
The job market's shift toward people skills is real—but decades of data reveal a more nuanced picture than your LinkedIn feed suggests.