Until now there was little evidence of the influence of large governments on happiness and when it existed, it was positive. We show that structural government consumption and other measures of long-term government imbalances significantly decrease happiness and life satisfaction in European...

In this paper, the amount of income redistribution in the United States, the European Union, and Switzerland is compared and empirically related to economic, political, and behavioral determinants elaborated in the literature. Lying in between the two poles, Switzerland provides unique evidence...

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broader range of questions than in previous studies. In questions inserted into a...

Before the transition governments had strong distributional objectives, which they pursued mainly by direct controls over state enterprise wage rates and hiring decisions, yielding a highly compressed wage distribution. During the reform they maintained similar controls over state enterprises,...

This paper studies the problem of redistribution between individuals having different mortality rates. We use a continuous time model in which there are two types of individuals characterized by different survival probability paths. Individual preferences are represented by a generalized...

Most studies of subjective well-being in developing countries use cross-sectional data, which makes it difficult to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. In this paper, we use three rounds of panel data and robust non-linear panel data models to investigate the trends and determinants...

This is the first paper that studies the causal effect of studying economics on subjective well being. Based on a survey among 918 students of economics and other social sciences, we estimate the effects of studying in the different fields on individual life satisfaction. Controling for personal...

Sleep is an important part of life, with an individual spending an estimated 32 years of her life asleep. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and that...

This study is an investigation into relative overeducation and life satisfaction using British longitudinal data. The focus is on young people rather than the whole of the life cycle, avoiding the possibility that overeducation may simply capture the increased participation in Higher Education...

This investigation employs dynamic panel analysis to provide new insights into the phenomenon of adaptation. Using the British Household Panel Survey, it is demonstrated that happiness is largely (but not wholly) contemporaneous. This can help provide explanations for previous findings, where...