This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect onsubjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types ofbenchmarks...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional lossesare from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death ofa child; the third-worst is the death of a parent...

Using fixed effects ordered logit estimation, we investigate the relationship between part-timework and working hours satisfaction; job satisfaction; and life satisfaction. We account forinterdependence within the family using data on partnered men and women from the BritishHousehold Panel Survey...

Much of the industrialized world is undergoing a significant demographic shift, placing strain on public pension systems. Policymakers are responding with pension system reforms that put more weight on privately managed retirement funds. One concern with these changes is the effect on individual...

We describe Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to welfare evaluationin the language of standard welfare economics, and assess to what extentit provides a genuine alternative for individual welfare measurement andpolicy evaluation. We review the nascent empirical literature on the...

We use a panel vector autoregressions model to examine the coevolution of changes in happinessand changes in income, health, marital status as well as employment status for the BritishHousehold Panel Survey (BHPS) data set. This technique allows us to simultaneously analyzethe impact of the...

A framework is proposed for organizing phenomena related to the (mis)predictionof utility, in particular neglecting adaptation. A categorization is introduced that accounts forasymmetries in misprediction. In decision-making, goods and activities satisfying extrinsicdesires are more salient than...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paperexplores whether norms regarding the appropriate pay for women compared to menmay explain these findings. In order to capture the spatial variation in such norms, wetake community level information on citizens’ approval...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuableskills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match betweenjob characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on subjective well-being it ispossible to...

Obesity has become a major health issue. Research in economics has providedimportant insights as to how technological progress reduced the relative price of food andcontributed to the increase in obesity. However, the increased availability of food might wellhave overstrained will power and led...