Evidence from the behavioral sciences, notably economics and psychology, has profoundly changed the way policymakers and practitioners present expert advice to consumers. This chapter examines the behavioral science evidence on financial advice and explores its implications for the financial...

We examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using data from the British Cohort Study. Our SWB measures encapsulates both life satisfaction and mental health, and we consider both relative and absolute movements in income. We find that relative income mobility is...

A large literature documents the correlates and causes of subjective well-being, or happiness. But few studies have investigated whether people choose happiness. Is happiness all that people want from life, or are they willing to sacrifice it for other attributes, such as income and health?...

There is increasing research on the impact of social norms on economic behavior. The research to date has a number of limitations: 1) it has not de-coupled the impact of the norm and the knowledge required to understand how to change behavior based upon it; and 2) it has not understood the...

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom...

There is a strong suggestion from the existing literature that volunteering improves the wellbeing of those who give up their time to help others, but much of it is correlational and not causal. In this paper, we estimate the wellbeing benefits from volunteering for England's National Health...

Although there has been a proliferation of research and policy work into how nudges shape people’s behaviour, most studies stop far short of welfare analysis. In the current work, we critically reflect on recent efforts to proxy the welfare impact of nudges using willingness to pay and...

Current estimates of the intangible costs of violent crime, such as the pain, grief and suffering experienced by victims, are not very robust. This paper sets out the different methods that can be used to provide more defensible cost estimates, and that use data that are currently available. One...