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 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...

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...

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>

Much evidence suggests that people are concerned with their relative consumption, i.e., their consumption in relation to the consumption of others. Yet, the social costs of conspicuous consumption have so far played little (or no) role in savings-based indicators of sustainable development. The...

This paper examines the causal effect of job loss on overall and cause-specific mortality. Using linked employer-employee register data, we identified the job losses due to all establishment closures in Sweden in 1987 and 1988. Hence, we have extended the case study approach, which has dominated...

A number of behaviours influence health in a non-monotonic way. Physical activity and alcohol consumption, for instance, may be beneficial to one’s health in moderate but detrimental in large quantities. We develop a demand-for-health framework that incorporates the feature of a...