Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi- experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in London, Paris, and Berlin during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. We show...

Compulsory military service is still a prominent feature of young people's careers in many countries. We use the abolition of compulsory military and civil service for males in 2011 in Germany as a natural experiment to identify effects of institutionalized career disruptions on life...

Richer people are happier than poorer people, but when a country becomes richer over time, its people do not become happier. This seemingly contradictory pair of findings of Richard Easterlin has be-come famous as the Easterlin Paradox. However, it was met with counterevidence. To shed more...

This paper presents empirical evidence that racial diversity and immigrant population at the local level tend to be associated with lower life satisfaction for Whites by matching individual data with the county-level population data during the period 2005-2010. The magnitudes I find suggest that...

We study the effects of Massachusetts' healthcare reform on individuals' subjective well-being. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we find that the reform significantly improved Massachusetts residents' overall life-satisfaction. This result is robust to various...

This article comments on the role of empirical subjective well-being research in public policy within a constitutional, procedural perspective of government and state. It rejects the idea that, based on the promises of the measurement, we should adopt a new policy perspective that is oriented...

This study analyzes the effects of the 2014 Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion on the subjective well-being of individuals in the United States. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that the expansion has significantly improved the overall life satisfaction of...

Using longitudinal data for children aged 10-15 years living in England in 2009-2014 we test the hypothesis that income matters for children’s life satisfaction. The results suggest that children are more satisfied with life the more income their family has. Income effects are larger the less...