It is puzzling that people feel quite unhappy when they become unemployed, while at thesame time active labor market policies are needed to bring unemployed back to work morequickly. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigate whether there isindeed such a puzzle. First, we...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...

This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect onsubjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types ofbenchmarks...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paperexplores whether norms regarding the appropriate pay for women compared to menmay explain these findings. In order to capture the spatial variation in such norms, wetake community level information on citizens’ approval...

Volunteering constitutes one of the most important pro-social activities. FollowingAristotle, helping others is the way to higher individual well-being. This view contrasts with theselfish utility maximizer who avoids costs from helping others. The two rival views are studiedempirically. We find...

Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the socialsciences has provided a major new stimulus to the discourse on individual happiness.Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective wellbeingis often taken as a proxy measure for...

This paper sheds new light on the role of regional labor market conditions for regional mobility. We study competition for vacant jobs along two dimensions - between employed and unemployed job searchers, and between resident and non-resident job searchers - within a simple matching framework....

We use individual data for Great Britain over the period 1992-2009 to compare the probabilitythat employed and unemployed job seekers find a job and the quality of the job they find. Thejob finding rate of unemployed job seekers is 50 percent higher than that of employed jobseekers, and this...