Despite strong growth performance in transition economies in the last decade, residents of transition countries report abnormally low levels of life satisfaction. Using data from the World Values Survey and other sources, we study various explanations of this phenomenon. First, we document that...

The “transition happiness gap” has been one of the most robust findings in the life satisfaction literature. Until very recently, scholars using various datasets on life satisfaction have shown that residents of post-communist countries were significantly less satisfied with their lives than...