Are people condemned to an inherent level of experienced happiness? A review of the economic research on subjective well-being gives reason to the assessment that happiness can change. First, empirical findings clearly indicate that people are not indifferent to adverse living conditions when...

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint...

How to undertake distributional comparisons when personal well-being is measured using income is well-established. But what if personal well-being is measured using subjective well-being indicators such as life satisfaction or self-assessed health status? Has average well-being increased or...

Non-intersection of appropriately-defined Generalized Lorenz (GL) curves is equivalent to a unanimous ranking of distributions of ordinal data by all Cowell and Flachaire (Economica 2017) indices of inequality and by a new index based on GL curve areas. Comparisons of life satisfaction...

This paper aims to measure differences in risk behavior among expert chess players. The study employs a panel data set on international chess with 1.4 million games recorded over a period of 11 years. The structure of the data set allows us to use individual fixed-effect estimations to control...

How should we interpret the World Values Survey (WVS) trust question? We conduct an experiment in India, a low trust country, to correlate the WVS trust question with trust decisions in an incentivized Trust Game. Evidence supports findings from one strand of the fractured literature - the WVS...

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? Using subjective well-being data, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth are experienced. We find that measures of life satisfaction and affect are more than twice as sensitive to...

This paper presents the Global Preference Survey, a globally representative dataset on risk and time preferences, positive and negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust. We collected these preference data as well as a rich set of covariates for 80,000 individuals, drawn as representative samples...

In "Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia," Blanchflower and Oswald (2005) observe an apparent puzzle: they claim that Australia ranks highly in the Human Development Index (HDI), but relatively poorly in happiness. However, when we compare their happiness data with...

There is no significant relationship between the improvement in happiness and the long term rate of growth of GDP per capita. This is true for three groups of countries analyzed separately - 17 developed, 9 developing, and 11 transition - and also for the 37 countries taken together. Time series...