We study happiness adaptation to income and poverty using an individual panel data on life satisfaction of 10046 subjects living in China from 2010 to 2018. We find robust evidence of adaptation to both income and poverty. The adaptation to poverty result is new to the literature, whereas...

The paper uses an appropriate survey from rural China to answer the question: Is happiness infectious, i.e. does the happiness of an individual depend positively on the happiness of their reference group?  The evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, but the challenge is to solve the...

If society's goal is to increase people's feelings of well-being, economic growth in itself will not do the job. Full employment and a generous and comprehensive social safety net do increase happiness. Such policies are arguably affordable not only in higher income nations but also in countries...

Long term trends in happiness and income are not related; short term fluctuations in happiness and income are positively associated. Evidence for this is found in time series data for developed countries, transition countries, and less developed countries, whether analyzed separately or pooled....

We show how the concepts of remembered utility and experienced utility correspond to cognitive appraisals of life satisfaction and emotion/affect respectively, as these concepts are used in psychology. Cognitive life satisfaction, or remembered utility, is relatively stable over time and can be...

This paper examines whether intergenerational transmission of happiness exists in China between preadolescents and their parents, and what factors are correlated with subjective well-being among them. We find that parents’ and their children's levels of subjective well-being are indeed...