This study measures the welfare effects of technological goods using a recent European pooled cross-sectional dataset. We find that fixed and mobile phones, music players and personal computers, including those with an Internet connection, are associated with significantly higher levels of...

This paper investigates the welfare effects of labor market institutions, placing an emphasis on how the institutions’ effects are differentiated by socio-demographic subgroups. We study how life satisfaction is affected by employment protection and the level and duration of unemployment...

This paper presents a formalization and modification of Martin Seligman’s concept of full life, employing basic microeconomics. A class of Stone–Geary utility functions is proposed as an analytical tool for scrutinizing individual decision making with respect to a pleasant, engaged and...

This paper revisits the debate over the importance of absolute vs. relative income as a correlate of subjective well-being using data from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world with high levels of corruption and poor governance. We do so by combining household data with...

Subjective well-being has been studied by social scientists for decades mostly in developed countries. Little is known about determinants of subjective well-being in developing countries and more particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using 2005–2008 World Values Survey (n = 1,533) this...

Casas et al. (J Happiness Stud 9(2):197–205, <CitationRef CitationID="CR8">2008</CitationRef>) found no significant relationship between paired answers given by parents and their 12–16-year-old children (N = 266) for a single-item scale on overall life satisfaction (OLS). However, a significant, but low (.19) parent–child...</citationref>

The paper tests whether the well-being cost of own unemployment is higher in individualistic countries and among persons with more individualistic orientations. I consider two dimensions of individualism: family support and self-reliance. I adopt a multilevel regression methodology on data of...

More and more economists and politicians are advocating the use of comprehensive measures of well-being, on top of the usual national accounting measures, to assess the welfare of populations. Researchers using subjective well-being data should be aware of the potential biasing effects of the...