Economics ignores the possibility of hedonic adaptation (the idea that people bounce back from utility shocks). This paper argues that economists are wrong to do so. It provides longitudinal evidence that individuals who become disabled go on to exhibit recovery in mental wellbeing. Adaptation...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional lossesare from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death ofa child; the third-worst is the death of a parent...

Econometric analyses in the happiness literature typically use subjective well-being (SWB) data to compare the mean of observed or latent happiness across samples. Recent critiques show that com-paring the mean of ordinal data is only valid under strong assumptions that are usually rejected by...

This paper examined whether people gained significant emotional benefits from not engaging in emotional hedging - betting against the occurrence of desired outcomes. Using the 2018 FIFA World Cup as the setting for a lab-in-the-field experiment, we found substantial reluctance among England...

We use the 2015-2016 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society) to look at subjective wellbeing around the time of the June 2016 EU membership Referendum in the UK (Brexit). We find that those reporting a preference for leaving the EU were 0.14 points less satisfied...

This paper uses the wellbeing valuation (WV) approach to estimate and monetize the wellbeing impacts of informal care provision on caregivers. Using nationally representative longitudinal data from the U.K., we address two challenging methodological issues related to the economic valuation of...

If policy-makers care about well-being, they need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a model using the British Cohort Study (1970). The most powerful childhood...

Very little is known about how the differential treatment of sexual minorities could influence subjective reports of overall well-being. This paper seeks to fill this gap. Data from two large surveys that provide nationally representative samples for two different countries - Australia (the...

Are people condemned to an inherent level of experienced happiness? A review of the economic research on subjective well-being gives reason to the assessment that happiness can change. First, empirical findings clearly indicate that people are not indifferent to adverse living conditions when...