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AbstractThe HILDA Survey is one of a small but growing number of household‐based, country‐specific longitudinal studies that share similar designs and data on individual and household social and economic wellbeing. All track outcomes over time as individuals dynamically form and dissolve personal and professional relationships. The similarities of the data invite researchers to study, compare and contrast social and economic outcomes of Australians with outcomes of residents of other countries. This review summarises published comparative research that uses HILDA data, notes how HILDA contributes, and highlights how and on what topics scholars might use HILDA data to generate additional insights.

Despite efforts to curb tobacco use, global tobacco addiction remains as strong as ever. Life-Course Smoking Behavior presents smoking trajectories of different generations of women and men from ten of the world's most visible countries, and places these data in economic, political, social, and cultural contexts. Lillard and Christopoulou's work is a unique and necessary text in its comparative life-course approach, making it a long overdue complement to the existing literature.

Despite efforts to curb tobacco use, global tobacco addiction remains as strong as ever. Smoking rates are declining very slowly in advanced countries, and they are increasing in the developing world. Yet, researchers still do not fully understand what drives smoking decisions. Life-Course Smoking Behavior presents smoking trajectories of different generations of women and men from ten of the world's most visible countries, with nation-specific representative samples spanning more than eighty years of recent history.

The promise of empirical evidence to inform policy makers about their population?s health, wealth, employment and economic well being has propelled governments to invest in the harmonization of country specific micro data over the last 25 years. We review the major data harmonization projects launched over this period. These projects include the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF), the Consortium of Household Panels for European Socio-Economic Research (CHER), the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), and the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We discuss their success in providing reliable data for policy analysis and how they are being used to answer policy questions. While there have been some notable failures, on the whole these harmonization efforts have proven to be of major value to the research community and to policy makers.