Happiness data--survey respondents' self-reported well-being (SWB)--have become increasingly common in economics research, with recent calls to use them in policymaking. Researchers have used SWB data in novel ways, for example to learn about welfare or preferences when choice data are...

Analyses of self-reported-well-being (SWB) survey data may be confounded if people use response scales differently. We use calibration questions, designed to have the same objective answer across respondents, to measure dimensional (i.e., specific to an SWB dimension) and general (i.e., common...

Validation of happiness measures is inherently challenging because subjective sensations are unobserved. We introduce a novel validation method: subjects report how happy they would feel (or did feel) after some specified event, as well as how they would respond (or would have responded) to a...

Combining data on around four million respondents from the Gallup World Poll and the US Daily Tracker Poll we rank 164 countries, the 50 states of the United States and the District of Colombia on eight wellbeing measures. These are four positive affect measures - life satisfaction, enjoyment,...

We augment Henderson, Storeygard, and Weil (2012)'s two-signal model of true income growth with a third signal to overcome its underidentification problem. The additional moment conditions from the third signal help fully identify all model parameters without ad-hoc calibrations of the GDP's...

Chapter 6 from the forthcoming Inclusive Wealth Report 2022 looks at human capital in greater detail, based on the latest human capital estimates from the Inclusive Wealth Report (IWR) project. In the chapter, which is repeated here, the growth of human capital and several of its constituent...

The "Easterlin paradox" suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear positive...

Some technologies save lives -- new vaccines, new surgical techniques, safer highways. Others threaten lives -- pollution, nuclear accidents, global warming, the rapid global transmission of disease, and bioengineered viruses. How is growth theory altered when technologies involve life and death...

In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of residential sorting, can lead to non-random...

We document the dynamics of tax-based measures of work mediated by online platforms from 2012 through 2021. We present a measurement framework to account for high reporting thresholds on some information returns using returns from states with lower reporting thresholds to provide a more complete...