Medical care at the end of life, estimated to contribute up to a quarter of US health care spending, often encounters skepticism from payers and policy makers who question its high cost and often minimal health benefits. However, though many observers have claimed that such spending is often...

This chapter uses happiness data to assess the quality of government. Our happiness data are drawn from the Gallup World Poll, starting in 2005 and extending to 2017 or 2018. In our analysis of the panel of more than 150 countries and generally over 1,500 national-level observations, we show...

Increasing attention is being paid in academic, policy, and public arenas to subjective measures of well-being. This promising trend represents a shift towards measuring positive outcomes in psychology and greater realism in the study of economic behaviour. After a general review of past and...

Chronic pain clearly lowers utility, but it is empirically challenging to estimate the monetary compensation needed to offset this utility reduction. We use the subjective well-being method to estimate the value of pain relief among individuals age 50 and older. We use a sample of 64,205...

Validation of happiness measures is inherently challenging because subjective sensations are unobserved. We introduce a novel validation method: subjects report how happy they would feel (or did feel) after some specified event, as well as how they would respond (or would have responded) to a...

Using two large US surveys, we estimate the effects of unemployment on the subjective well-being of the unemployed and the rest of the population. For the unemployed, the non-pecuniary costs of unemployment are several times as large as those due to lower incomes, while the indirect effect at...

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...