Social leisure is generally found to be positively correlated with life satisfaction in the empirical literature. We ask if this association captures a genuine causal effect by using panel data from the GSOEP. Our identification strategy exploits the change in social leisure brought about by...

Empirical analyses of the determinants of life satisfaction routinely include the number of children as one of the socio demographic controls, without explicitly considering that, for a given household income, more children imply a lower level of income per family member. The variable “number...