The paper deals with the effects of social participation activities on life satisfaction. Using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) for 2010, marginal effects of binary probit estimations on life satisfaction are presented. Strong gender differences are observable. While sport, welfare or...

This paper investigates the role of civic engagement, an important form of social capital from the supply side, in buffering the adverse effects of challenging life circumstances in three key domains-employment, marriage, and health-on individual subjective well-being, specifically in terms of...

Are unhappiness, high concern for money and scarcity of social capital different faces of the same phenomenon? Economists tend to treat these variables as distinct correlates of well-being. On the contrary, positive psychologists argue that they all relate to materialism, a system of personal...

Can online social contacts replace the importance of real-life social connections in our pursuit of happiness? With the growing use of social network sites (SNSs), attention has been increasingly drawn to this topic. Our study empirically examines the effect of SNS use on happiness for different...

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

Volunteering constitutes one of the most important pro-social activities. Following Adam Smith, helping others is the way to higher individual well-being. This view contrasts with the selfish utility maximizer who avoids costs from helping others. The two rival views are studied empirically. We...

What do social surveys of life cycle experience tell us about the determinants of subjective well-being? First, that the psychologists? setpoint model is wrong. Life events in the nonpecuniary domain, such as marriage, divorce, and physical disability, have a lasting effect on well-being, and do...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens? approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that ?women and men shall...

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...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens? approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that ?women and men shall...