We use data on the subjective well-being (SWB) of more than 91,000 individuals in 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to assess the well-being effects of unemployment, inflation and national income growth. The relationships found are used to...

Using subjective well-being data for more than 91,000 individuals in 30 OECD countries, 1990-2008, we study how people's implicit aversion towards inflation varies with income and other socio-economic characteristics. While inflation aversion decreases with income, it increases with the...

We develop and test a model of social comparison in which individuals gain status through pro-social behavior (competitive altruism) and in which they endogenously choose the reference group and associated reference standard involved in signaling status (reference group selection). In our...

Drawing on the distinction between envy and signaling effects in income comparison, this paper uses 307,465 observations for subjective well-being and its covariates from Germany, 1990-2009, to study whether the nature of income comparison has changed in the process of economic development, and...

Large-scale social surveys typically elicit levels of happiness and/or life satisfaction. This paper studies how such reports of happiness and life satisfaction are related to measures of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). Major findings are the following: (1) PA and NA levels...

Immigration is a crucial issue in contemporary politics, and attitudes towards immigration are highly dispersed in many countries. We treat individuals' immigration friendliness (IF) as a feature of their self-image or identity and hypothesize that, similar to other pro-social self-images,...

Recent literature has found that individuals holding a greener self-image display higher levels of life satisfaction. We extend the single-country setting of that research to a transnational perspective and explore whether a relationship exists between green self-image (GSI) and life...

The literature on subjective well-being (SWB) and the environment has found robust evidence of positive net marginal SWB from pro-environmental behavior (PEB), that is, positive marginal SWB net of the associated costs in terms of money, time and effort (Finding 1). Accordingly, people could...

Previous literature has identified income, poor health and social relationships as the most important predictors of subjective well-being (SWB). In addition, the literature has identified a non-linear relationship between age and SWB, with a dip in SWB in mid-life. Explanations of the non-linear...

Resilience is the ability of an entity to manage a destabilizing shock or rise in pressure. The recently published State Resilience Index (SRI) includes ecological resilience along with several other "pillars" of state resilience. Given that indicators of subjective well-being (SWB) are...