World life expectancy has risen by around 20 years in the last 50 years. This period has also witnessed rising happiness levels around the world suggesting that happiness might be one of the causes behind the decline in mortality. We investigate the relationship between happiness and mortality...

This paper presents evidence on causal influence of happiness on social capital and trust using German Socio-Economic Panel. Exploiting the unexplained cross-sectional variation in individual happiness (residuals) in 1984 to eliminate the endogeneity problem, the paper finds that happier people...

I examine the impact of happiness on consumption and savings behavior using data from the DNB Household Survey from the Netherlands and the German Socio-Economic Panel. Instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, the results suggest that happier people save more, spend less, and...