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...

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...

This paper estimates the relationship between various sub-indicators of economic freedom and life satisfaction for 122 countries. The estimation results show that life satisfaction is positively related to the quality of the legal system and protection of property rights. For poor countries,...

The present research explores the socio-economic problems arising in a typical peripheral rural area - the Wide Area of Daunian Mountains (WADM)- in Southern Italy in order to analyse the concept of ‘well being’ through the analysis of the ‘quality of life’. For these purposes, we will...

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)...

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 (SOEP,...

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the (short-term) welfare consequences of an alcohol ban. Using subjective well-being data to proxy individual welfare, I apply a regression discontinuity design where the date of the implementation of the ban in the German federal state of...

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the (short-term) welfare consequences of an alcohol ban. Using subjective well-being data to proxy individual welfare, I apply a regression discontinuity design where the date of the implementation of the ban in the German federal state of...

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...