We quantify the value of changes in life circumstances in Germany following reunification. To this end, we develop and implement a fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction in the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find strong negative effects on life satisfaction from being recently...

Two recent papers argue that many results based on ordinal reports of happiness can be reversed with suitable monotonic increasing transformations of the associated happiness scale (Bond and Lang 2019; Schröder and Yitzhaki 2017). If true, empirical research utilizing such reports is in trouble....

Recent research underscores the sensitivity of conclusions drawn from the application of econometric methods devised for quantitative outcome variables to data featuring ordinal outcomes. The issue is particularly acute in the analysis of happiness data, for which no natural cardinal scale...

We investigate the impact of nine types of adolescent (verbal, physical, indirect) school/domestic bullying on life satisfaction, and two mental health outcomes (emotional symptoms and hyperactivity/inattention) using the Understanding Society dataset during 2009-13. Bullying significantly...

Az ország fejlettségi szintjéhez képest a magyarok kirívóan elégedetlenek az életükkel. Eközben Ausztria, mellyel sok a kulturális és történelmi hasonlóság, az elégedettségi listák élmezőnyéhez tartozik. Magyar és osztrák háztartási szintű adatokon becsülve a...

Uncertainty about the future is an important determinant of well-being,especially in developing countries where financial markets and other market failures result in ineffective insurance mechanisms. However, separating the effects of future uncertainty from realised events, and then measuring...

The paper compares different estimation strategies of ordered response models in the presence of non-random unobserved heterogeneity. By running Monte Carlo simulations with a range of randomly generated panel data of differing cross-sectional and longitudinal dimension sizes, we assess the...

This paper presents the first household-level study to examine the combined impacts of the global food and financial crises on household food security and economic well-being in a developing country. Using longitudinal survey data of 1,800 rural households from 12 districts of Bangladesh over...

Recent years have seen a considerable increase in the number of economists researching the role of income, employment status and other demographic characteristics in determining individual life satisfaction or happiness. In this paper we investigate how life satisfaction is affected by a large...