Part I How can we know who is happy? Conceptual and methodological issues -- Objective happiness / Daniel Kahneman -- Ecological momentary assessment / Arthur A. Stone, Sual S. Shiffman, Marten W. DeVries -- Measurement issues in emotion research / Randy J. Larsen and Barbara L. Fredrickson --...

Informed or rational desire, capability and prudential value list views of well-being - mustaccommodate human limitations, as well as address issues about adaptation and paternalism. Theysometimes address adaptation by toughening the requirement(s) on those desires, satisfaction of...

In a recently published article, Bruni and Stanca (2008) suggest that television viewing has a negative impact on life satisfaction. In this note we argue that the empirical approach they use (an approach that omits the main effect of TV viewing in life satisfaction) is problematic.We estimate a...

Subjective well-being is a complex phenomenon coevolving with events in important do-mains of life. Panel vector autoregressions are a suitable tool to analyze the underlyingstructure of changes in happiness and its coevolution with changes in income, health, wor-ries, marital status and...

We use information from two prospective British birth cohort studies to explorethe antecedents of adult malaise, an indicator of incipient depression. Thesestudies include a wealth of information on childhood circumstances, behaviour,test scores and family background, measured several times...

[...]This paper contributes to the identification of adaptive expectations by using ten years of panel data from the British Household Panel Survey to study the process of adaptation based on the individual’s own previous experience. Subjective assessments of financial well-being at time t,...

There is a well-established positive correlation between life-satisfaction measures andincome in individual level cross-sectional data. This paper attempts to provide some evidenceon whether this correlation reflects causality running from money to happiness. I use industrywage differentials as...

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health ofworkers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addressestwo important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectionalcausality problems and (b)...