We study the effect of relational goods on life satisfaction. We consider that retirement is an event after which the time investable in personal relationships increases so we instrument social life, which we suspect of being endogenous, with the sample proportion of retired by year. With such...

The role of sociability and relational goods has generally been neglected in the formulation of standard economics textbook preferences. Our findings show that relational goods have significant and positive effects on self declared life satisfaction, net of the impact of other concurring...