A matching model will explain both unemployment and economic growth by considering the underground sector. Three problems can thus be simultaneously accounted for: (i) the persistence of underground economy, (ii) the ambiguous relationships between underground employment and unemployment, and...

The recent debate on happiness in economics has revived interest in Scitovsky's 1976 book The Joyless Economy, which aims at explaining the income-happiness paradox, i.e. 'why [American] unprecedented and fast-growing prosperity had left its beneficiaries unsatisfied.' A dynamic economic model...

Self-reported life satisfaction (SRS) in Italy has started to decline well before the current crisis. This paper explores the relationship between SRS and quality of life in Italy, using the ISAE data-base on households. SRS was surveyed on 2000 individuals in May 2008, November 2008 and April...

The empirical evidence from the econometrics of self-reported job satisfaction and from organisational psychology on job performance confronts economic theory with some puzzling results. Job performance is found to be positively correlated with job satisfaction, whereas effort is assumed to be a...

Most popular explanations cannot fully account for the declining trend of U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years. We test the hypothesis that the relationship between social capital and happiness at the individual level accounts for what is left unexplained by previous research....

During the most recent decades people in industrialised countries have reported both a stagnant or even declining subjective well-being, as Easterlin (1974) originally observed, and deterioration in their social and family ties, as Putnam (2000) has claimed. The paper proposes an integrated...