Most people in Europe live in urban environments. For these people, urban green space is an important element of well-being, but it is often in short supply. We use self-reported information on life satisfaction and different individual green space measures to explore how urban green space...

Following a major earthquake off the Pacific coast of Japan, a tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three reactors in Fukushima, causing a major nuclear accident on 11 March 2011. Based on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach we use panel data for 5,979 individuals...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...

Diversification into non-agricultural activities in rural areas can be broadly classified as either survival-led or opportunity-led. The existence of these two types of non-agricultural activities implies a U-shaped relationship between the share of income derived from non-agricultural...

This paper evaluates the effect of AIDS-related mortality on per-capita incomes of surviving household members, using a large nationally representative sample of rural households from Zambia. To minimize selection bias that may arise because AIDS is likely to be the endogenous outcome of...

This paper discusses three approaches to well-being in economics which use insights from psychology to support their position: Scitovsky's Joyless Economy, happiness economics, and the constitutional approach to happiness in economics. It shows that in the way these approaches make use of...