A huge research literature, across the behavioral and social sciences, uses information on individuals' subjective well-being. These are responses to questions - asked by survey interviewers or medical personnel - such as how happy do you feel on a scale from 1 to 4? Yet there is little...

Countries often spend billions on university research. There is growing interest in how to assess whether that money is well spent. Is there an objective way to assess the quality of a nation's world-leading science? I attempt to suggest a method, and illustrate it with modern data on economics....

This paper documents some of the patterns in modern microeconomic data on young people’s employment, attitudes and entrepreneurial behaviour. Among other sources, the paper uses the Eurobarometer Surveys; the Labour Force Surveys from Canada and the Current Population Survey in the United...

We explore the idea that happiness and psychological well-being are U-shaped in age. The main difficulty with this argument is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). First, using data on 500,000...

Understanding the reasons why individuals take risks, particularly unnecessary risks, remains an important question in economics. We provide the first evidence of a powerful connection between happiness and risk-avoidance. Using data on 300,000 Americans, we demonstrate that happier individuals...

What makes workers happy? Here we argue that pure ?rank? matters. It is currently believed that wellbeing is determined partly by an individual?s absolute wage (say, 30,000 dollars a year) and partly by the individual?s relative wage (say, 30,000 dollars compared to an average in the company or...

A large literature in macroeconomics assumes a social objective function, W(p, U), where inflation, p, and unemployment, U, are bads. This paper provides some of the first formal evidence for such an approach. It uses data on the reported well-being levels of approximately one quarter of a...

Background Life events?like illness, marriage, or unemployment?have important effects on people. But there is no accepted way to measure the different sizes of these events upon human happiness and psychological health. By using happiness regression equations, economists have recently developed...

We show that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970's to the 1990's. Happiness...