The concept of "utility" is often used in ambiguous ways in economics, from having substantive psychological connotations to being a formal placeholder representing a person's preferences. In the accounts of the early utilitarians, it was a multidimensional measure that has been condensed during...

Despite lower incomes the self-employed often report higher job satisfaction. But this increased job satisfaction only sometimes translates into higher life satisfaction, likely due to the heterogeneous nature of self-employment. By distinguishingdifferent types of self-employment, this paper...

In the literature on Sen’s capability approach, studies focussing on the empirical measurement of conversion factors are comparatively rare. We add to this field by adopting a measure of “conversion efficiency” that captures the efficiency with which individuals convert their re-sources...

This short note seeks to replicate the quantile regression analysis in Binder and Coad (2011), but taking into account individual-specific fixed effects (using the BHPS data set). It finds declining effects of the four main variables of interest (health, social life, income, education) over the...

Working in non-profit organizations has been shown to be good for individuals' satisfaction with their jobs despite lower incomes. This paper explores the impact of nonprofit work on life satisfaction more general for the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and finds a significant positive...

Behavioral economics has shown that individuals sometimes make decisions that are not in their best interests. This insight has prompted calls for behaviorally informed policy interventions popularized under the notion of "libertarian paternalism." This type of "soft" paternalism aims at helping...

Work and life satisfaction depends on a number of pecuniary and nonpecuniary factors at the workplace and determines these in turn. We analyze these causal linkages using a structural vector autoregression approach for a sample of the German working populace collected from 1984 to 2008, finding...

Unemployment has been robustly shown to strongly decrease subjective well-being (or "happiness"). In the present paper, we use panel quantile regression techniques in order to analyze to what extent the negative impact of unemployment varies along the subjective well-being distribution. In our...

A robust relationship between subjective well-being and mortality has been established in the literature. While this relationship has been confirmed for many measures and data sets, few studies address how it is affected by concrete diseases. In this paper we assess for the British Household...