In recent economic literature, there has been an increasing interest in modellingpreferences as endogenous. Some arguments go along the lines that institutions shapepreferences. This paper suggests that adopting a more substantive concept ofpreferences furthers our understanding of how they...

There is an ambiguity in Amartya Sen's capability approach as to what constitutes an in-dividual's resources, conversion factors and valuable functionings. What we here call the\circularity problem" points to the fact that all three concepts seem to be mutually en-dogenous and interrelated. All...

Subjective well-being is a complex phenomenon coevolving with events in important do-mains of life. Panel vector autoregressions are a suitable tool to analyze the underlyingstructure of changes in happiness and its coevolution with changes in income, health, wor-ries, marital status and...

While there is little doubt that innovations drive economic growth, their effects on well-being areless clear. One reason for this are ambivalent effects of innovations on well-being that result frompecuniary and technological externalities of innovations, argued to be inevitable. Another...

Despite lower incomes, the self-employed consistently report higher satisfaction with theirjobs. But are self-employed individuals also happier, more satised with their lives as awhole? High job satisfaction might cause them to neglect other important domains of life,such that the fullling job...

We use a panel vector autoregressions model to examine the coevolution of changes in happinessand changes in income, health, marital status as well as employment status for the BritishHousehold Panel Survey (BHPS) data set. This technique allows us to simultaneously analyzethe impact of the...