Uncertainty about the future is an important determinant of well-being,especially in developing countries where financial markets and other market failures result in ineffective insurance mechanisms. However, separating the effects of future uncertainty from realised events, and then measuring...

This paper analyses whether individuals are influenced by the day of the week when reporting subjective well-being. By using a large panel data set and controlling for observed and unobserved individual characteristics, we find a large day-of the-week effect. Overall, we find a ‘blue’ Sunday...

This paper analyzes life satisfaction in Romania in 2001, 12 years after the collapse of communism and the beginning of the transition into a market economy. Using a survey of 1770 individuals, we find that our results are very similar to studies in Western Europe and the US. Life satisfaction...

We studied whether relative income has an impact on subjective well-being among extremely poor people. Contrary to the findings in developed countries, we cannot reject the hypothesis that relative income has no impact on subjective well-being in rural areas of northern Ethiopia.<p>

We examine what factors are correlated with subjective well-being among Chinese preadolescents. In particular, we investigate whether preadolescents’ subjective well-being is correlated with their parents’ subjective well-being. Interestingly, we find that the factors that affect parents’...

Unlike most studies of subjective well-being in developing countries, we use a fixed effects regression on three rounds of rich panel data to investigate the impact of relative standing on life satisfaction of respondents in urban Ethiopia. We find a consistently large negative impact of...

Most studies of subjective well-being in developing countries use cross-sectional data, which makes it difficult to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. In this paper, we use three rounds of panel data and robust non-linear panel data models to investigate the trends and determinants...