Becoming unemployed has negative effects on life satisfaction; a transition from unemployment to employment, however, has stronger positive effects in absolute terms. The asymmetry of the non-pecuniary effect indicates a potential “omitted variable bias” in previous empirical happiness studies

Previous research has found that subjective well-being (SWB) is lower for individuals classified as being in poverty. Using panel data for 39,239 individuals living in Germany from 2005-2013, we show that people's SWB is negatively correlated with the state-level poverty ratio while controlling...

Quality of life and satisfaction with life are of particular importance for individuals as well as for society concerning the “demographic change” with now longer retirement periods. This study will contribute to the life satisfaction discussion and quantifies life satisfaction and pattern...

Quality of life and satisfaction with life are of particular importance for individuals as well as for society concerning the "demographic change" with now longer retirement periods. This study will contribute to the life satisfaction discussion and quantifies life satisfaction and pattern of...

This paper studies how people in certain country view their status relate to corporate investment decisions. Utilizing the data from the World Happiness Report published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, we find that country's overall happiness is positively...

A large “happiness”, or life satisfaction, literature in economics makes use of Likert-like scales in assessing survey respondents' cognitive evaluations of their lives. These measures are being used to estimate economic benefits in every empirical field of economics. Typically, analysis of...

Based on the German Socio-Economic Panel, the influence of the body mass index on health, earnings and satisfaction is analysed by gender. Basic results are: health worsens, income declines and satisfaction is poorer with higher body mass index. If control variables are added, estimates are...

Using panel data from the BHPS and its Understanding Society extension, we study life satisfaction (LS) and income over nearly two decades, for samples split by education, and age – to our knowledge for the first time. The highly educated went from lowest to highest LS, though their average...

We analyze the determinants of global life satisfaction in two countries (The Netherlands and the U.S.), by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions. We find global life satisfaction of happiness is well-described by four domains: job or daily activities, social...

This paper explores a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries. We distinguish four groups of aggregate variables as potential determinants of satisfaction: political, economic, institutional, and human development...