A series of crises, culminating with COVID-19, shows that going "Beyond GDP" is urgently necessary. Social and environmental degradation are consequences of emphasizing GDP as a measure of progress. This degradation created the conditions for the COVID-19 pandemic and limited the efficacy of...

Recent studies have found that self-reported life satisfaction drops during the transition into parenthood which has been mainly attributed to work-family conflict. This study investigates whether different forms of flexible employment can alleviate this drop in parental life satisfaction during...

Despite the burgeoning happiness economics literature, scholars have largely ignored explorations of how individuals or countries translate given resources into well-being. Using a balanced panel on 91 countries from Gallup Analytics between 2009-2014 and borrowing insights from production...

We study the effects of Massachusetts' healthcare reform on individuals' subjective well-being. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we find that the reform significantly improved Massachusetts residents' overall life-satisfaction. This result is robust to various...

How to undertake distributional comparisons when personal well-being is measured using income is well-established. But what if personal well-being is measured using subjective well-being indicators such as life satisfaction or self-assessed health status? Has average well-being increased or...

Family and intergenerational relationships are becoming increasingly important as sources of support and care for the elderly population in the rapidly aging Asian societies. However, this has also raised concern over the reinforcement of cultural preferences for sons as a source of old-age...

We estimate a measure of well-being efficiency that assesses countries' ability to transform inputs into subjective well-being (Cantril ladder). We use the six inputs (real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom of choice, absence of corruption, and generosity)...

Using data drawn from 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Modules, this paper examines the existence of son preference among fathers in the U.S. by estimating the effect of child gender on the fathers' subjective well-being. A wide range of subjective well-being measures,...