Watching television is the most time-consuming human activity besides work but its role for individual well-being is unclear. Negative consequences portrayed in the literature raise the question whether this popular pastime constitutes an economic good or bad, and hence serves as a prime example...

Air pollution results in high economic costs arising from its negative impacts on human health, especially in urban areas. Driving restriction policies such as low emission zones (LEZs) are designed to improve air quality. Indeed, empirical analyses in this Weekly Report confirm that LEZs reduce...

Losing a partner is a life-changing experience. We draw on numerous datasets to examine differences between widowed and partnered older women and to provide a comprehensive picture of well-being in widowhood. Most importantly, our analysis accounts for time use in widowhood, an aspect which has...

Informal care has drawn much attention among scholars and policymakers as it concerns an essential but hard to evaluate resource of welfare. Albeit several studies addressed the monetary value of informal care, differences in the relationship between caregivers and recipients have often been...

Korea is a top player in emerging digital technologies, with an outstanding digital infrastructure and a dynamic ICT sector. The COVID-19 outbreak highlighted the importance of digitalisation to contain the spread of the virus, by allowing quick testing and tracing of infected people, and...

A growing literature concludes that terrorism impacts the economy, yet less is known about its impact on utility. This paper estimates the impact of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing on well-being, by exploiting representative U.S. daily data. Using both a regression discontinuity and an event...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments to implement lockdowns. While lockdowns may help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to population well-being. We use Google Trends data to test whether the lockdowns implemented in Europe and America led to...

Using a large-scale panel data set, we trace the evolution of incomes and well-being around the entry into 'solo self-employment' - that is, running a business without employees. We find that solo self-employment is used to self-insure against employment shocks: employment rates fall and poverty...

This study investigates the determinants of life satisfaction among the oldest-old (i.e. individuals aged 80 or over) in China. We use the 2011/2012 Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey data (n = 6530) for this paper. Logistic regression is used to analyse the effects of...