This paper argues that measures of life satisfaction, now being collected annually by the Gallup World Poll in more than 130 countries, permit a much broader view of the quality and consequences of development than other common measures. While these data show the importance of conventionally...

In this paper we employ World Values Survey measures of life satisfaction as though they were direct measures of utility, and use them to evaluate alternative features and forms of government in large international samples. We find that life satisfaction is more closely linked to several World...

This paper takes a different tack in addressing one of the fundamental questions in economics: what are the factors that determine the distribution of jobs and wages? In Adam Smith%u2019s classic formulation, and in much of the subsequent literature, wage levels have been used to estimate the...

The persistence of high savings-investment correlations and home-country bias in portfolio construction at the national level is contrasted with new evidence of savings behaviour in Canadian provinces. We confirm that national borders clearly divert flows of capital to domestic investments, but...

This paper summarizes and extends our recent work using life satisfaction regressions to estimate the relative values of financial and non-financial job characteristics. The well-being results show strikingly large values for non-financial job characteristics, especially workplace trust and...

This paper uses data for nineteen industrial countries over the period 1960-1985 to examine the evidence for international convergence of technical progress. Several models of convergence, including a model in which convergence is affected by changes in a country's openness to trade, are...

Departures from self-centred, consumption-oriented decision making are increasingly common in economic theory and are well motivated by a wide range of behavioural data from experiments, surveys, and econometric inference. A number of studies have shown large negative externalities in individual...

This paper presents a new public-use dataset for community-level life satisfaction in Canada, based on more than 400,000 observations from the Canadian Community Health Surveys and the General Social Surveys. The country is divided into 1215 similarly sampled geographic regions, using natural,...

Charities often circulate widespread donation appeals to garner support for campaigns, but what impact do these campaigns have on the well-being of individuals who choose to donate, those who choose not to donate, and the entire group exposed to the campaign? Here we investigate these questions...

This paper first reviews existing studies of the links between good governance and subjective well-being. It then brings together the largest available sets of national-level measures of the quality of governance to assess the extent to which they contribute to explaining the levels and changes...