This paper analyzes the determinants of global life satisfaction in two countries (The Netherlands and the U.S.), by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions. The authors find global life satisfaction of happiness is well-described by four domains: job or daily...

It is widely believed that health plays a major role in retirement decisions. The most important problem in including health in retirement models is the lack of availability of a good measure of health at the individual level in existing data sets. This problem is exacerbated when a model...

In the Dutch Postcode Lottery a postal code (19 households on average) is randomly selected weekly, and prizes - consisting of cash and a new BMW - are awarded to lottery participants living in that postal code. On average, this generates a temporary, unexpected income shock equal to about eight...

Over the last two decades policy reforms in the Netherlands have increased work incentives, resulting in rising employment rates at older ages. Over the same period health of the population has increased as well. A natural question is how much people could work taking into account their health...

The authors provide both a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relation between register and survey data. By distinguishing between different sources of deviations between survey and register data the authors are able to reproduce several stylized facts in the literature. In doing so, they...

This paper investigates the role of pain in determining self-reported work disability in the U.S., the U.K. and The Netherlands. Even if identical questions are asked, cross-country differences in reported work disability remain substantial. In the U.S. and the Netherlands, respondent...

This paper studies determinants of drinking behavior and formation of subjective thresholds of acceptable drinking behavior using a sample of students in a major Irish University. It finds evidence of strong associations between amounts of alcohol students consume and drinking of their fathers...

I propose to build an advanced data collection environment for the social sciences that maximizes opportunities for innovation, and is fast, cost effective, and easy for everyone in the scientific community to use. The core of this “laboratory” is a representative panel of households in the...

Recent economic research on international comparisons of subjective well-being suffers from several important biases due to the potential incomparability of response scales within and across countries. In this paper the authors concentrate on self-reported satisfaction with income in two...