This paper attempts to shed light on some aspects of the U.S. consumers’apparent bulimia that was at the origin of the recent global crisis. We seek to show how different characteristics of the American society and economy, which are usually considered separately, are consistently related to...

The evolution over time of subjective well-being (SWB) in transition countries exhibit some peculiarities: greater variations which are more strongly correlated with the trends of GDP relative to other countries. What is the possible role of social trust in predicting such variations? We compare...

What does predict the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We answer this question correlating cross country time series of subjective well-being with the time series of social capital and/or GDP. First, we adopt a bivariate methodology similar to the one used used by Stevenson and...

The worrying decline of social capital (Putnam, 2000) and the disappointing trends of subjective well-being (Easterlin, 1974) raise urgent questions for modern societies: is the erosion of social capital a general feature of western societies or is it rather a characteristic aspect of the...

The aim of this paper is to provide a synthetic macro index of social cohesion based on the observation of several individual level variables. Based on the definition of social cohesion by Bernard (1999) and Chan et al. (2006) an index of social cohesion (henceforth VALCOS Index) was created. It...

Missing data is a very frequent obstacle in many social science studies. The absence of values on one or more variables can signi?cantly affect statistical analyses by reducing their precision and by introducing selection biases. Being unable to account for these aspects may result in severe...

Using longitudinal data on households living in Germany, we quantify what part of the change in subjective well-being observed over the last two decades is predicted by changes in variables which typically show strong cross-sectional correlation with subjective well-being. We especially focus on...

Different theories have been advanced to explain what really makes people happy or satisfied with their life, but they are mainly focused on developed countries. Furthermore, there is still not a general agreement on whether the determinants of subjective well-being are the same or not across...

Main achievements: The major objective of the project was accomplished through building life-table of survival analysis (event history analysis or duration analysis or transition analysis) for describing transitions from school-to-work using longitudinal micro-data. It is important to mention...

Empirical studies have shown that voluntary job-to-job changes have a positive effect on wage mobility. In this paper, we suggest that the impact of a job change on wage growth depends on the position in the wage distribution. Using panel data from the UK and Germany, we investigate the effect...