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

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on subjective well-being it is possible...

Obesity has become a major health issue. Research in economics has provided important insights as to how technological progress reduced the relative price of food and contributed to the increase in obesity. However, the increased availability of food might well have overstrained will power and...

High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular job security, in workers' well-being by exploiting sectorspecific institutional differences in...

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

In many countries environmental policies and regulations are implemented to improve environmental quality and thus individuals' well-being. However, how do individuals value the environment? In this paper, we review the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) representing a new non-market valuation...

Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulus to the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective wellbeing is often taken as a proxy measure for...

Despite a vast empirical literature that assesses the impact of financial integration on the economy, evidence of substantial welfare gains from consumption risk sharing remains elusive. While maintaining the usual cross-country perspective of the literature, this paper explicitly accounts for...

The access to Services of General Interest (SGI) is a highly relevant factor for territorial cohesion and in creating economic opportunity. Although the topic of SGI was not on the top of the policy agenda during the last decade, it attracts far more interest since the start of the economic...

The aim of this study is to discuss the impact of polycentric structures and other regional patterns on the provision of Social Services of General Interest (SSGI). Polycentricity has been a favoured spatial pattern of EU policies since the European Spatial Development Perspective ESDP 1999...