This study estimates the impact of education on self-reported happiness across 50 American states using the recently available Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (WBI). A 3SLS model is used to estimate the simultaneous impact of education, income, and health on aggregated subjective well-being...

This paper assesses the long-run toll taken by a large-scale technological disaster on welfare, well-being and mental health. We estimate the causal effect of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe after 20 years by linking geographic variation in radioactive fallout to respondents of a nationally...

This paper assesses the long-run toll taken by a large-scale technological disaster on welfare, well-being and mental health. We estimate the causal effect of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe after 20 years by linking geographic variation in radioactive fallout to respondents of a nationally...

We develop a theoretical framework that considers four distinct explanatory channels through which neighbors' income could affect utility: public goods, cost of living, expectations of future income, and the direct effect (relative income hypothesis (RIH) and altruism). The relationship is...

One of the central topics in recent empirical work on subjective well-being is that of comparisons to a reference group, over a variety of domains of economic and social life. One such reference group is neighbours. Any resulting spatial spillovers that are identified have potential implications...

This paper examines how contextual and institutional factors are associated with individual subjective well-being, which is measured by individuals' happiness, during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data collected in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of Korea,...

This paper examines a wide range of determinants of retiree well-being of retirees. Using data from the 2000 Health and Retirement Study, increases in economic factors such as income lead to higher well-being, although relative income has a larger effect than absolute income. The strongest...

In this paper, we address the relationship between age and several dimension of subjective wellbeing. Whilst literature generally finds a U-shaped age-profile in subjective well-being, this agepattern might only hold after controlling for objective life circumstances. The observed U-shaped...

There is a large amount of cross-sectional evidence for a midlife low in the life cycle of human happiness and well-being (a "U shape"). Yet no genuinely longitudinal inquiry has uncovered evidence for a U-shaped pattern. Thus some researchers believe the U is a statistical artefact. We...

This short note seeks to replicate the quantile regression analysis in Binder and Coad (2011), but taking into account individual-specific fixed effects (using the BHPS data set). It finds declining effects of the four main variables of interest (health, social life, income, education) over the...