Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important...

A cross-regional econometric analysis suggests that institutional factors in the form of direct democracy (via initiatives and referenda) and of federal structure (local autonomy) systematically and sizeably raise s elf-reported individual well-being. This positive effect can be attributed to...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g. pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the total...

The correct prediction of how alternative states of the world affect our lives is a cornerstone of economics. We study how accurate people are in predicting their future well-being when facing major life events. Based on individual panel data, we compare people's forecast of their life...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on reported satisfaction with life it is...

We analyze how the exposure to adverse macroeconomic conditions during the "impressionable years" (i.e., between the age of 18 and 25), in interaction with welfare state institutions, forms political attitudes in adulthood. Based on a large panel dataset of European countries, we find that...

Based on a unique repeated cross-sectional data set of school-aged children in Europe, the Middle East and North America, we analyze how children's subjective well-being is related to parents' employment status, depending on the institutional context. We find that parental unemployment is...

The belief that home ownership makes people happy is probably one of the most widespread intuitive theories of happiness. However, whether it is accurate is an open question. Based on individual panel data, we explore whether home buyers systematically overestimate the life satisfaction...