The measurement of wellbeing is central to public policy. There are three uses for any measure: 1) monitoring progress; 2) informing policy design; and 3) policy appraisal. There has been increasing interest in the UK and around the world in using measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) at each...

This article investigates Schkade and Kahneman's (1998) maxim that ‘Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.’ This article shows that whilst becoming unemployed hurts psychologically, unemployment has a greater impact on happiness if the...

The comparison of scaling methods used to value health states sometimes rests upon an analysis of aggregate scores. This analysis is usually undertaken once "inconsistent' respondents have been excluded from the data. However, it is important to be able to judge the extent to which respondents...

Chronically ill and disabled patients generally rate the value of their lives in a given health state more highly than do hypothetical patients imagining themselves to be in such states. Much of this difference may be due to actual patients' adaptation to their health states, a phenomenon that...

One way in which economists might determine how best to balance the competing objectives of efficiency and equality is to specify a Social Welfare Function (SWF). This article looks at how the stated preferences of a sample of the general public can be used to estimate the shape of the SWF in...

Many people remain in the same income group as their parents and this is a cause of much discussion and some concern. In this work, we examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using the British Cohort Study. Our SWB measures encapsulate life satisfaction and...

Quality continues to be placed at the heart of discussions about healthcare. This raises important questions about precisely what quality care is, and how it should be measured. An overall measure of subjective well-being (SWB) that assesses and joins up different stages of the treatment...

Financial incentives have been used in a variety of settings to motivate behaviors that might not otherwise be undertaken. They have been highlighted as particularly useful in settings that require a single behavior, such as appointment attendance or vaccination. They also have differential...

Innovation should improve people's lives. The links made between innovation and subjective wellbeing (SWB) have, however, rarely been made. We use a representative survey of the British population and new primary data to explore the relationship between innovation and SWB. We show that...

Preference elicitation methods require respondents to predict the impact a change in health might have on their future selves. The focus on the change in health is at the possible expense of other experiences of life once in that health state. We analyse personal preferences to a pairwise choice...