We use novel nonparametric techniques to test for the presence of non-classical measurement error in reported life satisfaction (LS) and study the potential effects from ignoring it. Our dataset comes from Wave 3 of the UK Understanding Society that is surveyed from 35,000 British households....

Econometric analyses in the happiness literature typically use subjective well-being (SWB) data to compare the mean of observed or latent happiness across samples. Recent critiques show that com-paring the mean of ordinal data is only valid under strong assumptions that are usually rejected by...