Happiness data--survey respondents' self-reported well-being (SWB)--have become increasingly common in economics research, with recent calls to use them in policymaking. Researchers have used SWB data in novel ways, for example to learn about welfare or preferences when choice data are...

Analyses of self-reported-well-being (SWB) survey data may be confounded if people use response scales differently. We use calibration questions, designed to have the same objective answer across respondents, to measure dimensional (i.e., specific to an SWB dimension) and general (i.e., common...

What utility notion do self-reported well-being (SWB) questions measure? We clarify the assumptions that underlie existing applications regarding the (i) life domains, (ii) time horizons, and (iii) other-regarding preferences captured by SWB data. We ask survey respondents what they had in mind...

We develop a theory that focuses on the general equilibrium and long-run macroeconomic consequences of trends in job utility--the process benefits and costs of work. Given secular increases in job utility, work hours per population can remain approximately constant over time even if the income...

This paper studies the optimal wage structure of a firm with imperfect monitoring of worker effort. We find that when firms can commit to (implicit) long-term contracts, imperfect monitoring leads to optimal wage profiles that reflect worker seniority. We provide a precise measure of seniority...

How quickly does marginal utility fall with increasing consumption? It depends on the dimension along which we consider concavity of the utility function. This paper estimates the distribution of heterogeneous curvature parameters in individuals' utility functions from hypothetical choice data,...

Collecting and analyzing panel data over the last four U.S. presidential elections, we study the drivers of self-reported happiness. We relate our empirical findings to existing models of elation, reference dependence, and belief formation. In addition to corroborating previous findings in the...

Psychologists have developed effective survey methods of measuring how happy people feel at a given time. The relationship between how happy a person feels and utility is an unresolved question. Existing work in Economics either ignores happiness data or assumes that felt happiness is more or...

In this short paper, we focus on one conceptual framework (Benjamin, Heffetz, Kimball, and Szembrot, 2014), which uses self-reported responses to subjective well-being (SWB) and stated preference (SP) survey questions to construct an index of well-being. We briefly review the framework and...

Are subjective well-being (SWB) measures a good empirical proxy for utility? We evaluate one necessary assumption: that people's preferences coincide with what they predict will maximize their SWB. Our method is to present survey respondents with hypothetical scenarios and elicit both choice and...