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...

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...

Pro-environmental behavior depends on the behavior of others. For a UK panel data set, we find that individuals' pro-environmental behavior increases in the behavior of peers in their region. This happens the more so, the greener the self-image of an individual. Diversity of regional green...

Self-employment contributes to employment growth and innovativeness and many individuals want to become self-employed due to the autonomy and flexibility it brings. Using “subjective well-being” as a broad summary measure that evaluates an individual’s experience of being self-employed,...

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...

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...

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...