The goal of this research is to examine the effects of good management of local governments on individual subjective well-being (SWB). We define three dimensions of good governance at the municipal level: accountability, government efficiency and control of corruption. We use a large survey of...

Countries have historically used economic indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure their success. However, there is growing recognition that economic indicators alone may not properly represent a country's growth and well-being. Multidimensional well-being indicators can be...

Older people experience high rates of depression and suicide, yet they make a positive net contribution to the economy through activities such as employment, volunteering, and looking after grandchildren. The wellbeing of older people is therefore important not only on moral but also economic...

Losing a partner is a life-changing experience. We draw on numerous datasets to examine differences between widowed and partnered older women and to provide a comprehensive picture of well-being in widowhood. Most importantly, our analysis accounts for time use in widowhood, an aspect which has...

In response to the Covid 19 health crisis, the French government has imposed various measures, referred to as social-distancing measures, including a lockdown with the primary objective of reducing face-to-face interactions between people in order to limit the spread of the virus. This paper...

In this paper, Happy Income is introduced as an indicator of physical and socio-psychic wellbeing. It is constructed on the assumption that socio-economic well-being is based on objective circumstances, such as personal income as well as on a subjective evaluation of life. In combining these...

Two recent papers argue that many results based on ordinal reports of happiness can be reversed with suitable monotonic increasing transformations of the associated happiness scale (Bond and Lang 2019; Schröder and Yitzhaki 2017). If true, empirical research utilizing such reports is in trouble....

Welfare economic analysis of health issues and policies can provide well balanced orderings of the state of the economy. This paper provides an innovative framework for welfare economic analysis of the relationships between economic growth, health outcomes and social welfare for both a...

What do social surveys of life cycle experience tell us about the determinants of subjective well-being? First, that the psychologists' setpoint model is wrong. Life events in the nonpecuniary domain, such as marriage, divorce, and physical disability, have a lasting effect on well-being, and do...

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important...