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...

While results are starting to emerge, not much is known yet about the dynamics of the labormarkets of the former Eastern economies, especially in the context of the current FinancialCrisis. Arguably, this is mainly due to paucity of (panel) data. By examining labor markettransitions, earnings...

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...

The Lisbon summit of the European Council in March 2000 declared the number ofpeople living in poverty and social exclusion in the European Union to beunacceptable, and called for steps to tackle the issue, beginning with the setting oftargets for particular indicators. The targets suggested...

The concept of social exclusion has been widely debated in Europe butits application to children has seen relatively little discussion. What couldbe meant by exclusion of children is the first main theme of the paper.Among other things, I consider the choice of reference group, thegeographical...

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...

In many countries environmental policies and regulations are implemented to improveenvironmental quality and thus individuals’ well-being. However, how do individuals valuethe environment? In this paper, we review the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) representinga new non-market valuation...

In a recently published article, Bruni and Stanca (2008) suggest that television viewing has a negative impact on life satisfaction. In this note we argue that the empirical approach they use (an approach that omits the main effect of TV viewing in life satisfaction) is problematic.We estimate a...

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...