We estimate the distributional effects of freedom and income on happiness for East Asian Chinese societies through an ordinal parametric quantile regression approach. The results show that freedom and income exhibit positive and significant effects across societies and happiness levels. The...

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...