Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people’s well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans’...

► Present work tests the cross-country comparability of a happiness equation including proxies of social capital and relational goods. ► It focuses on two extremely opposite groups of countries: the richest and the poorest ones. ► The happiness equation is stable in the two groups of...

What predicts the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We correlate the trends of subjective well-being with the trends of social capital and/or GDP. We find that in the long and medium run social capital largely predicts the trends of subjective wellbeing in our sample of countries. In...

This article is about the link between people’s subjective well-being, defined as an evaluation of one’s own life, and productivity. Our aim is to test the hypothesis that subjective well-being contributes to productivity using a two step approach: first, we establish whether...

The worrying decline of social capital (Putnam in Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster, New York, <CitationRef CitationID="CR27">2000</CitationRef>) and the disappointing trends of subjective well-being characterising the US (Easterlin in Nations and households in economic growth. Academic...</citationref>

Discovering whether social capital endowments in modern societies have been subjected or not to a process of gradual erosion is one of the most debated topics in recent economic literature. Inaugurated by Putnam’s pioneering studies, the debate on social capital trends has been recently...

What does predict the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We answer this question correlating cross country time series of subjective well-being with the time series of social capital and/or GDP. First, we adopt a bivariate methodology similar to the one used used by Stevenson and...

Discovering whether social capital endowments in modern societies have been subjected or not to a process of gradual erosion is one of the most debated topics in recent economic literature. This new stream of research has been inaugurated by Putnam’s pioneering studies about social capital...

We provide macro evidence that in the long run the trends of social capital are a strong predictor of the trends of subjective well-being. Our measure of social capital is the individual membership in groups or associations. We apply the bivariate methodology used in Easterlin and Angelescu...

Discovering whether social capital endowments in modern societies have been subjected or not to a process of gradual erosion is one of the most debated topics in recent economic literature. This new stream of research has been inaugurated by Putnam's pioneering studies about social capital...