Psychologists and sociologists usually interpret answers to happiness surveys as cardinal and comparableacross respondents (Kahneman et al. 1999). As a result, these social scientists run OLS regressionson happiness and changes in happiness. Economists, on the other hand, usually only assume...

Sociological research is increasingly using panel data to examine changes in diverse outcomes over life course events. Most of these studies have one striking similarity: they analyse changes between yearly time intervals. In this paper, we present a simple but effective method to model such...