In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

Using data drawn from the 2010 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Module, this study examines the relationship between three measures of subjective well-being based on time-use data and an objective measure of well-being. Whereas the measures of affect – net affect and the U-index – are...

Case studies across the social sciences have established a positive relationship between social status and happiness. In observational data, however, identification challenges remain severe. This study exploits the fact that in India people are assigned a caste from birth. In data on 1000...

Previous research has found that subjective well-being (SWB) is lower for individuals classified as being in poverty. Using panel data for 39,239 individuals living in Germany from 2005-2013, we show that people's SWB is negatively correlated with the state-level poverty ratio while controlling...