The 2004 European Union enlargement resulted in an unprecedented wave of 1.5 million workers relocating from Eastern Europe to the UK. We study how this migrant inflow affected life satisfaction of native residents in England and Wales. Combining the British Household Panel Survey with the Local...

The authors update previous findings on the total East-West gap in overall life satisfaction and its trend by using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1992 to 2013. Additionally, the East-West gap and its trend are separately analyzed for men and women as well as for...

This study examines the effects of social comparison with a wide range of reference groups on the life satisfaction of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands. For two sets of ethnic and life-domain reference groups, results are obtained that deviate from the findings of recent studies and that...

Despite its unprecedented growth in output per capita in the last two decades, China has essentially followed the life satisfaction trajectory of the central and eastern European transition countries - a U-shaped swing and a nil or declining trend. There is no evidence of an increase in life...

Richer people are happier than poorer people, but when a country becomes richer over time, its people do not become happier. This seemingly contradictory pair of findings of Richard Easterlin has be-come famous as the Easterlin Paradox. However, it was met with counterevidence. To shed more...

Microcredit has long been hailed as a powerful tool to promote livelihoods and reduce poverty through entrepreneurship. However, its impacts on people's subjective well-being remain underexplored. We present a unified theoretical framework for analyzing the effect of microcredit-enabled...