This chapter uses happiness data to assess the quality of government. Our happiness data are drawn from the Gallup … national happiness, but democratic quality is not. We also analyze other quality of government indicators. Confidence in … government is correlated with happiness, however forms of democracy and government spending seem not. We further discuss three …

were asked. People with higher incomes in any given year and location report higher levels of happiness, and people … interviewed on days when air pollution was worse than the local seasonal average report lower levels of happiness. Combining these …

evaluative measures are not the same thing, and that they cannot be used interchangeably as measures of "happiness" in welfare …

this paper I review cross-country evidence on happiness and life satisfaction and consider whether these data will likely … be replaced by the U-index. I find that first, that there are many similarities. According to both measures happiness is … large body of data on happiness that is unavailable on the U-index. For example, according to happiness research well …

Reported happiness provides a potentially useful way to evaluate unpriced goods and events; but measures of subjective … interpretation. Previous work tends to estimate time-invariant effects of events on happiness. In the presence of hedonic adaptation … provides a flexible, extensible econometric framework that accommodates adaptation and permits the comparison of happiness …

Validation of happiness measures is inherently challenging because subjective sensations are unobserved. We introduce a … they would respond (or would have responded) to a survey question about their happiness after the same event. The …