In a laboratory experiment designed to test aspiration-based theories of happiness, McBride (2010) found no evidence of the predicted negative effect of own past payments on subjects’ satisfaction with their current round payments. This paper presents further analysis of McBride’s data that...

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show first that life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of...

If policy-makers care about well-being, they need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a model using the British Cohort Study (1970). The most powerful childhood...