Using panel data from the BHPS and its Understanding Society extension, we study life satisfaction (LS) and income over nearly two decades, for samples split by education, and age - to our knowledge for the first time. The highly educated went from lowest to highest LS, though their average...

Wealth in addition to income determines to a large degree an individual’s consumption opportunities and economic situation, which should in turn affect their subjective well-being. We analyse empirically the relationship between life satisfaction as an indicator of subjective well being and...

Psychologists and sociologists usually interpret answers to happiness surveys as cardinal and comparableacross respondents (Kahneman et al. 1999). As a result, these social scientists run OLS regressionson happiness and changes in happiness. Economists, on the other hand, usually only assume...

Two recent papers argue that many results based on ordinal reports of happiness can be reversed with suitable monotonic increasing transformations of the associated happiness scale (Bond and Lang 2019; Schröder and Yitzhaki 2017). If true, empirical research utilizing such reports is in trouble....

We investigate the impact of nine types of adolescent (verbal, physical, indirect) school/domestic bullying on life satisfaction, and two mental health outcomes (emotional symptoms and hyperactivity/inattention) using the Understanding Society dataset during 2009-13. Bullying significantly...

Using information on life satisfaction and crime from the European Social Survey, we apply the life satisfaction approach (LSA) to determine the relationship between subjective well-being (SWB), income, victimization experience, fear of crime and various regional crime rates across European...

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi- experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in London, Paris, and Berlin during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. We show...

Measures of subjective well-being have gained substantial attention in economics as quantitative approximations of individual welfare. They allow researchers to study relevant determinants of welfare on an individual as well as on a societal level. These determinants might not to be easily...

Previous research has found that subjective well-being (SWB) is lower for individuals classified as being in poverty. Using panel data for 39,239 individuals living in Germany from 2005-2013, we show that people’s SWB is negatively correlated with the state-level poverty ratio while...

Previous research has found that subjective well-being (SWB) is lower for individuals classified as being in poverty. Using panel data for 39,239 individuals living in Germany from 2005-2013, we show that people's SWB is negatively correlated with the state-level poverty ratio while controlling...