We compare reported job satisfaction with vignette evaluations of hypothetical jobs by using a British, Greek and Dutch data set, containing 95 randomly assigned vignettes. In order to test comparability of international data sets recently the method of anchoring vignettes has been introduced by...

This study examines if couples time their work hours and how this work timing influences child care demand and the time that spouses jointly spend on leisure, household chores and child care. By using a innovative matching strategy, this studies identifies the timing of work hours that cannot be...

In this paper we attempt to explain individual, ordinally comparable,satisfaction levels. We postulate a simultaneous equation model where general satisfaction isexplained by exogenous shock and level variables, and by the values of the satisfactionswith respect to six distinct endogenous...

This paper contributes to the literature on subjective well-being (SWB) by taking into account different aspects of life, called domains, such as health, financial situation, job, leisure, housing, and environment. We postulate a two-layer model where individual total SWB depends on the...

Psychologists and sociologists usually interpret answers to happiness surveys as cardinal and comparableacross respondents (Kahneman et al. 1999). As a result, these social scientists run OLS regressionson happiness and changes in happiness. Economists, on the other hand, usually only assume...

In the last few decades, the study of ordinal data in which the variable of interest is not exactly observed but only known to be in a specific ordinal category has become important. In Psychometrics such variables are analysed under the heading of item response models (IRM). In Econometrics,...

Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by several methods, viz., voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully funded occupational pension systems, and mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go. The specific mixture of the three systems we will call the pension composition....

In this paper we evaluate the QALY loss, which may be assigned to the prevalence of specific chronic illnesses and physical handicaps. The analysis is based on an individual self-rating health satisfaction question asked in the British Household Panel Survey data set. This question provides a...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the importance of 'comparison income' for individual well-being or happiness. In other words, the influence of the income of a reference group on individual well-being is examined. The main novelty is that various hypotheses are tested: importance of...