Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important...

We study the importance of economists' professional situation toward their life satisfaction based on a unique survey of mostly academic economists. On average, economists report to be highly happy with life. Satisfaction is positively related to spending more time on doing research. The lack of...

Happiness research has been a great success by yielding new and important insights. These results are often used in a technocratic manner: governments should maximize, or at least raise, the subjective well-being of the population measured by the national happiness index. Yet the government has...