Aim/purpose - This study explores the crucial link between the quality of work life (QWL) and subjective well-being (SWB) among aviation industry employees. By delving into the current state of QWL and its relationship with key aspects of SWB, such as life satisfaction, positive affect, and...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be...

We explore the idea that happiness and psychological well-being are U-shaped in age. The main difficulty with this argument is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). First, using data on 500,000...

Most popular explanations cannot fully account for the declining trend of U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years. We test the hypothesis that the relationship between social capital and happiness at the individual level accounts for what is left unexplained by previous research....

This article argues that theories about the spatial distribution of poverty since World War II have always combined analyses of the impact of the built environment, of culture and of mobility of populations. However, the form taken by these combinations has varied with the logic of the...

In the United States happiness, on average, varies positively with socio-economic status; is fairly constant over time; rises to midlife and then declines; and is lower among younger than older birth cohorts. These four patterns of mean happiness can be predicted rather closely from the mean...

The quot;Easterlin paradoxquot; suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear...

The Origins of Happiness makes some valuable contributions to the subjective well-being literature. Of particular note is its emphasis on mental health and criminality, and its use of a life course approach. However, the objective of the book is to explicate the causes of well-being in general...

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be...

This paper investigates the effect of big-city life on individuals' well-being. Combining data on Italian municipalities' characteristics with individual-level survey data, I find that city size negatively affects subjective well-being. This association is not driven by omitted variable bias or...