Communism was a two-edged sword for the trustees of the former regime. Communist party members and their relatives enjoyed status and privileges, while secret police informants were often coerced to work clandestinely and gather compromising materials about friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We...

This paper analyzes how perceived income inequality is associated with subjective well-being. Using four waves of the "Social Inequality" module of the International Social Survey Programme, I show that the higher the level of perceived income inequality is, the lower the individual's perception...

Do you feel happier when you think you are richer? How does the perception of your own economic welfare affect your life satisfaction? This study examines subjective economic welfare and life satisfaction using the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey covering years 1994 through 2018. The study...

We propose a measure of well-being efficiency to assess countries' ability to transform inputs into subjective well-being (Cantril ladder). We use the six inputs (real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom of choice, absence of corruption, and generosity) identified in...

Social welfare payments (SWP) were designed with policy priority to transfer revenue to vulnerable groups, thereby addressing poverty and inequality. Previous studies have shown that SWPs alleviate poverty, but investigating their effect on well-being is sparse. We investigate the relationship...

The recent surge in analyses of subjective well-being (SWB) and the economics of happiness using large observational datasets has generated stylized facts about the relationship between SWB and various correlates. Because such studies are mostly concerned with the determinants of SWB, the...

Kassenboehmer and DeNew (2012) claim that there is no well-being age U-shape effect for Germany, when controlling for fixed effects and respondent experience and interviewer characteristics in the German Socio-Economic Panel, 1994-2006. We re-estimate with a longer run of years and restrict the...

The Easterlin Paradox states that at a point in time happiness varies directly with income, both among and within nations, but over time the long-term growth rates of happiness and income are not significantly related. The principal reason for the contradiction is social comparison. At a point...

This chapter summarizes the latest state of the art in economic research on unemployment and subjective well-being. Outcomes covered are general life satisfaction, affective well-being, and mental health. Special attention is paid to empirical evidence as obtained from popular panel data sets....