We know that when collective emotions are prolonged, it leads not only to action (which could be negative) but also to the formation of identity, culture, or an emotional climate. Therefore, policymakers must understand how collective emotions react to macro-level shocks to mitigate potentially...

During the global response to COVID-19, the analogy of fighting a war was often used. In 2022, the world faced a different war altogether, an unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since 2020 the world has faced these unprecedented shocks. Although we realise these events' health and economic...

It is well-established that a country's economic outcomes, including productivity, future income, and labour market performance, are profoundly influenced by the happiness of its people. Traditionally, survey data have been the primary source for determining people's happiness. However, this...

The study of well-being has evolved significantly over the past three decades, reflecting both theoretical advancements and real-world applications across diverse populations, domains, and times. One of the most pressing issues in contemporary well-being research is the intersection between...

This paper investigates whether there is co-movement in subjective wellbeing (swb) gender gaps and objective wellbeing (owb) gender gaps over time and whether swb gender gaps are caused by gender differences in endowments or by the different ways men and women value the pre-mentioned. This is...

This paper estimates Markov switching models with daily happiness (GNH) data from New Zealand for a period inclusive of the Covid-19 global health pandemic. This helps us understand the dynamics of happiness due to an external shock and provides valuable information about its future evolution....

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments have implemented lockdown regulations to curb the spread of the virus. Though lockdowns do minimise the physical damage of the virus, there may be substantial damage to population well-being. Using a pooled dataset, this paper analyses...

The pursuit of happiness. What does that mean? Perhaps a more prominent question to ask is, 'how does one know whether people have succeeded in their pursuit'? Survey data, thus far, has served us well in determining where people see themselves on their journey. However, in an everchanging...

In this article we describe how well-being changed during 2020 in ten countries, namely Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, New Zealand, South Africa, and Spain. Our measure of well-being is the Gross National Happiness (GNH), a country-level index built...

Social welfare payments (SWP) were designed with policy priority to transfer revenue to vulnerable groups, thereby addressing poverty and inequality. Previous studies have shown that SWPs alleviate poverty, but investigating their effect on well-being is sparse. We investigate the relationship...