In this study we examine the association between subjective well-being and material welfare using the data of 3600 individuals from the TÁRKI Household Monitor for the year 2007. Most of the empirical papers on the effect of income on subjective well-being use either OLS regression or ordered...

Using four waves of the European Social Survey, we analyze the association of income inequality and redistribution with subjective well-being. Our results provide evidence that people in Europe are negatively affected by income inequality, while reduction of inequality has a positive effect on...

According to international comparisons the Hungarians are extremely dissatisfied with their lives. Meanwhile Austria, with many cultural and historical similarities to Hungary, is in the forefront of the satisfaction lists. We have identified some of the important causes of Hungarian...

In this paper we analyze whether people who spend money on experiences rather than material things are more satisfied. Previous psychological studies have several drawbacks, and therefore their results might be biased and unreliable. Trying to avoid these drawbacks in this research we use...

In the last decade, a number of experiments have stated that spending money on experiences rather than on material goods tends to make people happier. However, the experimental designs used to analyze the relationship between consumption and subjective well-being had several limitations: small...

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important...

Using four waves of the European Social Survey, we analyze the association of income inequality and redistribution with subjective well-being. Our results provide evidence that people in Europe are negatively affected by income inequality, while reduction of inequality has a positive effect on...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on reported satisfaction with life it is...

Does individual well-being depend on the absolute level of income and consumption or is it relative to one's aspirations? In a direct empirical test, it is found that higher income aspirations reduce people's utility, ceteris paribus. Individual data on reported satisfaction with life are used...

Social norms are usually neglected in economics, because they are to a large extent enforced through non-market interactions and difficult to isolate empirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to work and we show that this norm has important economic effects. The...