Governments try to discourage risky health behaviours, yet such behaviours are bewilderingly persistent. We suggest a new conceptual approach to this puzzle. We show that expected utility theory predicts that unhappy people will be attracted to risk-taking. Using US seatbelt data, we document...

This paper examines the influence of community characteristics on self-proclaimed environmentalism. We find that the composition of a community affects the likelihood that a person claims to be a strong environmentalist, even after controlling for individual characteristics and pro-environment...

Using data from a new household survey on environmental attitudes, behaviors, and policy preferences, we find that current weather conditions affect preferences for environmental regulation. Individuals who have recently experienced extreme weather (heat waves or droughts) are more likely to...

This paper adds to the literature on the voluntary provision of public goods by showing that the warm glow that individuals gain depends on the perceived relative effectiveness of contributions. We use a new survey on pro-environment behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge and find that individuals...

An individual’s decision about how much to save depends on her perception of how current savings affects future well-being. Fatalistic individuals believe that they have little or no control over future outcomes. We develop a theoretical model linking fatalism to savings and test the...

The share of income held by the top 1 percent in many countries around the world has been rising persistently over the last 30 years. But we continue to know little about how the rising top income shares affect human well-being. This study combines the latest data to examine the relationship...

There is a growing concern within the social science community over the economic and social implications of the persistent rise in top income shares in the United States and in most other rich countries around the world over the last three decades. Although much of the recent economic research...

Background Life events?like illness, marriage, or unemployment?have important effects on people. But there is no accepted way to measure the different sizes of these events upon human happiness and psychological health. By using happiness regression equations, economists have recently developed...

We show that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970's to the 1990's. Happiness...