This study discusses and employs dynamic panel data to investigate life satisfaction. A key result is that approximately 90% of the impact of any commonly measured variable on well-being is contemporaneous. This reflects the finding that lagged life satisfaction has a small, positive and...

Sleep is an important part of life, with an individual spending an estimated 32 years of her life asleep. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and that...

Theory suggests that subjective well-being is affected by income comparisons and adaptation to income. Empirical tests of the effects often rely on self-constructed measures from survey data. This paper shows that results can be highly sensitive to simple parameter changes. Using large-scale...