Happiness research is on the rise, but is confounded by competing definitions of subjective well-being based on co-existing concepts, resulting in differing measures and giving rise to different potential policy applications. This paper motivates the societal necessity for using well-being...

Many empirical studies are ambiguous about whether good formal institutions are conducive to subjective well-being or not. Possibly, this ambiguity is caused by cross-section models that do not account for unobserved cultural and institutional effects. Using the World Value Survey 1980-2005,...

The gap between the willingness to accept and willingness to pay is the outcome of incomplete valuation. The problem therefore is more about completing the valuation procedure. The first part of the solution involves two items: one is the inclusion of the direct and indirect income effects and...

This paper presents the first empirical investigation into the effect of e-shopping on subjective well-being. The analysis relies on an Italian nationally and regionally representative dataset from Italy (n = 4,130) drawn from the 2008 wave of the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW)...

The subjective well-being approach to valuation is applied to the valuation of income inequality. Results show that objective inequality is a bad in the industrialized economies but a good in the emerging economies. Too much objective inequality is a bad in both areas. Results also show that...

Recent studies in economics of happiness focusing on the influence of different aspects of subjective well-being in transition countries. Here these countries are located in Eastern Europe. After aggregating a dataset which combines the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey, I use...

The subjective well-being approach to environmental valuation is applied to analyze the valuation of greenhouse gas emissions. Dimensions like population and income are then incorporated into the valuation to get the fairness-adjusted marginal value of emissions. The results indicate that the...

The subjective well-being approach to the valuation of international development is applied to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The rich countries have particular preferences for education, healthcare, and housing; they need compensation for failure to meet the targets by 2015. The poor...

We present an empirical model aimed at testing the relative income hypothesis and the effect of deprivation relative to mean income on subjective well-being. The main concern is to deal with subjective panel data in an ordered response model where error homoskedasticity is not assumed. A...

This paper presents quasi-experimental impact estimates of women self-help groups on subjective well-being in Orissa, India. We find that, on average, self-help group membership does not affect subjective well-being. However, our results at the same time reveal that subjective well-being sharply...