Happiness levels (states) are volatile and often fluctuate between a happy and unhappy state from one day to the next. The reasons for these shifts are mostly unobservable and not predictable. In this paper, we fit a Marko Switching Dynamic Regression Model (MSDR) to better understand the...

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments have implemented lockdown regulations to curb the spread of the virus. Though lockdowns do minimise the physical damage of the virus, there may be substantial damage to population well-being. Using a pooled dataset, this paper analyses...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments to implement lockdowns. While lockdowns may help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to population well-being. We use Google Trends data to test whether the lockdowns implemented in Europe and America led to...

Amidst the rapid global spread of Covid-19, many governments enforced country-wide lockdowns, with likely severe well-being consequences. The actions by governments triggered a debate on whether the well-being and economic costs of a lockdown surpass the benefits perceived from a lower infection...

This paper estimates Markov switching models with daily happiness (GNH) data from New Zealand for a period inclusive of the Covid-19 global health pandemic. This helps us understand the dynamics of happiness due to an external shock and provides valuable information about its future evolution....

This paper uses data from Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study to explore the association between fuel poverty and a set of well-being outcomes: life-satisfaction, self-reported health measures and more objectively measured biomarker data. Over and above the conventional...

Non-cognitive abilities are supposed to affect student's educational performance, who are challenged by parental expectations and norms. Parental gender stereotypes are shown to strongly decrease student wellbeing in China. Students are strongly more depressed, feeling blue, unhappy, not...

The catastrophic effects of natural disasters on social and economic systems are well-documented; however, their impacts on individual life satisfaction remain insufficiently understood. This study pioneers a causal analysis of cyclones' impacts on Australians' life satisfaction, using local...

We analyse how unemployment affects individuals' social networks, leisure activities, and the related satisfaction measures. Using the LISS panel, a representative longitudinal survey of the Dutch population, we estimate the effects by inverse propensity score weighting in a...

In this paper, we test the conventional wisdom in developing countries of 'more children, more happiness' by exploiting the cohort and provincial variations of elderly parents exposed to the one-child policy in China. Using nationally representative survey data from the 2015 China Health and...