We show how the concepts of remembered utility and experienced utility correspond to cognitive appraisals of life satisfaction and emotion/affect respectively, as these concepts are used in psychology. Cognitive life satisfaction, or remembered utility, is relatively stable over time and can be...

We use an augmented production function approach to examine the relationship between disaggregated energy consumption by fuel type and economic growth in Malaysia. The main finding is that diesel and motor petrol are the major contributors to economic growth in the long-run in Malaysia. The long...

Using a unique dataset from the Pearl River Delta in China we examine the factors associated with rural-urban migrants’ participation in, and expenditure on, illegal gambling. We find that similar demographic and lifestyle characteristics are associated with participation in, and...

This paper examines the effect of having a labour contract on a range of employee outcomes (hours worked, social insurance coverage, subjective wellbeing and wages) for a sample of urban and migrant workers in China. A methodological contribution is that we use propensity score matching, which...

This study has three purposes. The first is to examine the determinants of wage arrears among rural-urban migrants in China. The second is to examine the effect of wage arrears on economic wellbeing as proxied by wages. The third is to examine how experiencing wage arrears affects several...

A large body of literature attests to the growing social divide between urban residents and rural-urban migrants in China’s cities. This study uses a randomised experiment to test the effect of intergroup contact on attitudes between a group of urban adolescents and a group of rural-urban...

This study explores the relationship between home ownership and subjective wellbeing in urban China. We first present a theoretical model examining the relationship between housing property rights and subjective wellbeing in China. We then test the predictions of the theoretical model using a...

We examine the relationship between sexual activities and happiness using a sample of 3800 adults from China. We establish some firm results about the contribution of sexual activities and relationships to happiness for an important country other than the United States. Our main finding is that...

This paper uses a novel identification strategy proposed by Lewbel (2012, J. Bus. Econ. Stat.) to illustrate how causation between job satisfaction and life satisfaction can be established with cross-sectional data. In addition to examining the relationship between composite job satisfaction and...

This paper examines the long-term effects of exposure to civil war and genocide on the educational attainment and labor productivity of individuals in Cambodia. Given the well-documented causal links between schooling and labor productivity, it is surprising that past studies show that civil...