We decompose the persistent satisfaction gap between East and West Germany into effects of objective circumstances and subjective mentality, the latter presumed to be a legacy of communist socialization. Using the methodology proposed by Senik (2014) in a cross-national context, we capture...

Immigration is a crucial issue in contemporary politics, and attitudes towards immigration are highly dispersed in many countries. We treat individuals' immigration friendliness (IF) as a feature of their self-image or identity and hypothesize that, similar to other pro-social self-images,...

Electricity from renewable sources avoids the disadvantages of conventional power generation (air pollution, greenhouse gases, nuclear risk) but often meets with local resistance due to visual, acoustic, and odor nuisance. We use representative panel data on the subjective well-being of 36,475...

Conceptualizing externalities from perceived nuclear risk as being related to distance from nuclear facilities, we estimate the relationship between Swiss citizens' life satisfaction (understood as a proxy of utility) and the distance of their place of residence from the nearest nuclear power...

Previous research has found that subjective well-being (SWB) is lower for individuals classified as being in poverty. Using panel data for 39,239 individuals living in Germany from 2005-2013, we show that people's SWB is negatively correlated with the state-level poverty ratio while controlling...

Previous studies on the determinants of attitudes toward immigration can be classified into those that take a utilitarian perspective, focusing on individuals' perceptions of real-world impacts of immigration, and those that look at immigration attitudes from the point of view of ideological...

Tying in with a small number of studies on green norms, identity and subjective well-being, this paper studies the relationship between holding a green self-image and life satisfaction in the UK. Focusing on (sub-national) regions as the unit of reference, we investigate if and how the...

The literature on subjective well-being (SWB) and the environment has found robust evidence of positive net marginal SWB from pro-environmental behavior (PEB), that is, positive marginal SWB net of the associated costs in terms of money, time and effort (Finding 1). Accordingly, people could...

Previous literature has identified income, poor health and social relationships as the most important predictors of subjective well-being (SWB). In addition, the literature has identified a non-linear relationship between age and SWB, with a dip in SWB in mid-life. Explanations of the non-linear...

Resilience is the ability of an entity to manage a destabilizing shock or rise in pressure. The recently published State Resilience Index (SRI) includes ecological resilience along with several other "pillars" of state resilience. Given that indicators of subjective well-being (SWB) are...