From Average Joe's happiness to Miserable Jane and Cheerful John: using quantile regressions to analyze the full subjective well-being distribution
Standard regression techniques are only able to give an incomplete picture of the relationship between subjective well-being and its determinants since the very idea of conventional estimators such as OLS is the averaging out over the whole distribution: studies based on such regression techniques thus are implicitly only interested in Average Joe's happiness. Using cross-sectional data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for the year 2006, we apply quantile regressions to analyze effects of a set of explanatory variables on different quantiles of the happiness distribution and compare these results with a standard regression. Among our results we observe a decreasing importance of income, health status and social factors with increasing quantiles of happiness. Another finding is that education has a positive association with happiness at the lower quantiles but a negative association at the upper quantiles. We explore the robustness of our findings in various ways.
Year of publication: |
2011
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Authors: | Binder, Martin ; Coad, Alex |
Published in: |
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. - Elsevier, ISSN 0167-2681. - Vol. 79.2011, 3, p. 275-290
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Publisher: |
Elsevier |
Keywords: | Quantile regressions Subjective well-being Happiness Life satisfaction Mental well-being BHPS |
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