This chapter uses happiness data to assess the quality of government. Our happiness data are drawn from the Gallup World Poll, starting in 2005 and extending to 2017 or 2018. In our analysis of the panel of more than 150 countries and generally over 1,500 national-level observations, we show...

This paper uses a variety of individual-level survey data from several countries to test for interactions between subjective well-being at different ages and variables measuring the nature and quality of the social context at work, at home, and in the community. While earlier studies have found...

This paper surveys evidence documenting positive linkages among social capital, prosocial behaviour, and subjective well-being. Whether in the workplace, at home, in the community, or among nations, better and deeper social connections, and especially higher levels of trust are linked to higher...

This paper uses the first three waves of the Gallup World Poll to investigate differences across countries, cultures and regions in the factors linked to life satisfaction, paying special attention to the social context. Our principal findings are: First, using the larger pooled sample, we find...

This paper summarizes and extends our recent work using life satisfaction regressions to estimate the relative values of financial and non-financial job characteristics. The well-being results show strikingly large values for non-financial job characteristics, especially workplace trust and...

In this paper we employ World Values Survey measures of life satisfaction as though they were direct measures of utility, and use them to evaluate alternative features and forms of government in large international samples. We find that life satisfaction is more closely linked to several World...

A well-being approach requires looking beyond COVID-19 deaths to compare the performance of elimination versus mitigation strategies as measured by other important supports for well-being. What do the data show? Our comparison based on 2020 data shows a virus elimination strategy to be more...

We study the consequences of month-end lending incentives for Chinese bank managers. Using data from two banks, one state-owned and the other partially privatized, we show a clear increase in lending in the final days of each month, a result of both more loan issuance and higher value per loan....