A new perspective on life satisfaction and well-being over the life courseWhat makes people happy? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human priorities and to promote public policy changes that are based on what really matters to people. Drawing on a range of...

Understanding who in the population is psychologically resilient in the face of major life events, and who is not, is important for policies that target reductions in disadvantage. In this paper we construct a measure of adult resilience, document its distribution, and test its predictability by...

The paper uses 15 waves of BHPS data to provide an integrated analysis of the roles of both individual social status and upward mobility relative to own parents on job and life satisfaction, preferences for redistribution, pro-public sector attitudes and voting. Both greater individual social...

We use life satisfaction and Body Mass Index (BMI) information from three waves of the SOEP to test for social interactions in BMI between spouses. Social interactions require that the cross-partial effect of partner’s weight and own weight in the utility function be positive. Using life...

We use life satisfaction and Body Mass Index (BMI) information from three waves of the GSOEP to test for social interactions in BMI between spouses. Semi-parametric regressions show that partner’s BMI is, beyond a certain level, negatively correlated with own satisfaction. Own BMI is...