To what extent are improvements in quality of life (material living levels, health, education, political and civil rights, happiness, and the like) associated with economic growth? International comparisons of quality of life (QoL) conditions almost always point to a strong positive association...

The study of international well-being and its distribution remains focused on income. This paper addresses multidimensional well-being from a capabilities perspective during the last one-and-a-half centuries. Relative inequality (population-weighted) fell in health and education since the late...

Many scholars have argued that once “basic needs” have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing...

We study the association between fiscal policy and subjective wellbeing using fiscal data on 34 countries across 129 country-years, combined with over 170,000 people’s subjective wellbeing scores. While past research has found that "distortionary taxes" (e.g. income taxes) are associated with...

We study the association between fiscal policy and subjective wellbeing using fiscal data on 35 countries and 130 country-years, combined with over 170,000 people's subjective wellbeing scores. While past research has found that ‘distortionary taxes' (e.g. income taxes) are associated with...

Traditional economics identifies a person's well-being with the goods and services the person consumes and the utility that the person gets from such consumption. This, in turn, has led to the widely used approach of welfarism that uses individual utilities as ingredients for evaluating a...

This paper calculates the value of experiencing mental illness, either directly or indirectly through knowing someone near, family, or friends (NFF), who is affected. Using the well-being valuation method, which explores the trade-offs between income and self-reported experiences that maintain...

If policy-makers care about well-being, they need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a model using the British Cohort Study (1970). The most powerful childhood...

Many politicians believe they can intervene in the economy to improve people's lives. But can they? In a social experiment carried out in the United Kingdom, extensive in-work support was randomly assigned among 16,000 disadvantaged people. We follow a sub-sample of 3,500 single parents for 5...

The paper demonstrates how Sen's (1985) alternative approach to welfare economics can be used to shed light on the wellbeing of very young children. More specifically, we estimate versions of the three key relations from his framework using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP)...