Self-reported life satisfaction (SRS) in Italy has started to decline well before the current crisis. This paper explores the relationship between SRS and quality of life in Italy, using the ISAE data-base on households. SRS was surveyed on 2000 individuals in May 2008, November 2008 and April...

The empirical evidence from the econometrics of self-reported job satisfaction and from organisational psychology on job performance confronts economic theory with some puzzling results. Job performance is found to be positively correlated with job satisfaction, whereas effort is assumed to be a...

The recent debate on happiness in economics has revived interest in Scitovsky's 1976 book The Joyless Economy, which aims at explaining the income-happiness paradox, i.e. 'why [American] unprecedented and fast-growing prosperity had left its beneficiaries unsatisfied.' A dynamic economic model...

Most popular explanations cannot fully account for the declining trend of U.S. reported well-being during the last thirty years. We test the hypothesis that the relationship between social capital and happiness at the individual level accounts for what is left unexplained by previous research....

This collection of essays on Verdoorn's Law - the relationship between the growth of industrial productivity and output - presents a number of comprehensive surveys and assessments of the vast literature available. The collection not only includes an English translation of Verdoorn's seminal...

During the most recent decades people in industrialised countries have reported both a stagnant or even declining subjective well-being, as Easterlin (1974) originally observed, and deterioration in their social and family ties, as Putnam (2000) has claimed. The paper proposes an integrated...

The paper investigates the relation between social capital and life satisfaction focusing on the distinction between bonding and bridging. Using the latest version of the combined World and European Values Surveys, the authors first address the question of measurement of social capital by means...

This paper develops a standard matching model to address the problem of the hidden sector, as it is characterised in Italy, i.e. framed in a rather advanced economic and institutional setting, but also linked to the socio-economic regional dualism. The main novel features of the model are that...

Few would dispute that the well-being of individuals is one of the most desirable aims of human actions. However, approaches on how to define, measure, evaluate, and promote well-being differ widely. The conventional economic approach takes income (or the power to acquire market goods) as the...