Many recent writings in health policy have proposed that health be valued directly and in monetary terms using the new well-being valuation method. Yet there is no clear consensus on what the best measure of individual's experience may be for the evaluation process. To shed light on this issue,...

This paper tests empirically for ex-post moral hazard in a system based on demand-side subsidies. In the Netherlands, demand-side subsidies were introduced in 1996. Clients receive a cash benefit to purchase the type of home care (housework, personal care, support with mobility, organisational...

Patterns of informal care are documented throughout the day with Dutch time use diary data. The diary data enable us to identify a, so far overlooked, source of opportunity costs of informal care, i.e. the necessity to perform particular tasks of informal care at specific moments of the day....

This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more left-wing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more right-wing. Parents, politicians and voters are probably not aware of this phenomenon - nor are social scientists. The paper discusses its economic and evolutionary roots. It also...

Is affluence a good thing? The book The Challenge of Affluence by Avner Offer (2006) argues that economic prosperity weakens self-control and undermines human well-being. Consistent with a pessimistic view, we show that psychological distress has been rising through time in modern Great Britain....

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be...

Economics ignores the possibility of hedonic adaptation (the idea that people bounce back from utility shocks). This paper argues that economists are wrong to do so. It provides longitudinal evidence that individuals who become disabled go on to exhibit recovery in mental wellbeing. Adaptation...

The importance of noncognitive childhood skills in predicting higher wages is well documented in economics. This paper studies the reverse. Using surveys of lottery winners, we analyze the effects of unearned income on the Big Five personality traits. After correcting for potential endogeneity...

This paper is an empirical study of slope heterogeneity in job satisfaction. It provides evidence from the generalized ordered probit models that different job characteristics tend to have different distributional impacts on the overall job satisfaction. For instance, standard models tend to...

This paper tests whether there is a potential payoff to grandparenthood in terms of life satisfaction. Using the new nationwide survey for the UK, which consists of over 5,000 grandparents and 6,000 non-grandparents aged 40 and above, and a flexible multiple-index ordered probit model with...