This paper attempts to answer an interesting but empirically challenging question: Do changes in well-being (life satisfaction or happiness) lead to changes in consumption and savings behavior? The paper uses regional sunshine as an instrument for personal happiness using the Dutch Household...

This paper investigates whether people’s psychological resilience to one of the most important economic shocks – job loss – can be predicted using early childhood characteristics. Using a longitudinal data that tracked almost 3000 children into adulthood, we showed that the negative effect...

We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and...

This study analyzes whether subjective well-being measures can explain variation in peaceful uprisings, in addition to the objective measures typically used in analyses of uprisings. Using a database combining data on uprisings and subjective well-being for 118 countries over the period 2007 to...

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 uses Romanian survey data to investigate the determinants of individual life and financial satisfaction, with an emphasis on the role of public and private transfers received. A possible concern is that these transfers are unlikely to be exogenous to satisfaction. We use recursive...

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...

In a provocative paper, Stevenson and Wolfers (2009) provide evidence that women over the last several decades experienced an absolute and relative decline in happiness. The current paper draws upon novel data from the DDB Needham Life Style Survey to take another look at the evolution of...

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...

In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion using information on self-reports of subjective personal well-being from multiple datasets, including three cross-sectional surveys and two panel surveys, namely the Gallup World Poll, the European Social Survey, the...