Standard regression techniques are only able to give an incomplete picture of the relationship between subjective well-being and its determinants since the very idea of conventional estimators such as OLS is the averaging out over the whole distribution: studies based on such regression...

Subjective well-being is a complex phenomenon coevolving with events in important domains of life. Panel vector autoregressions are a suitable tool to analyze the underlying structure of changes in happiness and its coevolution with changes in income, health, worries, marital status and...

Behavioral economics has shown that individuals sometimes make decisions that are not in their best interest. This insight has prompted calls for behaviorally-informed policy interventions popu-larized under the notion of "libertarian paternalism". This type of soft paternalism aims at helping...

As a result of the disenchantment with traditional income-based measures of welfare, alternative welfare measures have gained increasing attention in recent years. Two of the most prominent measures of well-being come from subjective well-being research and the (objective) capability approach....

Large-scale land acquisition has increased dramatically in recent years. The question whether land deals can benefit both the local population and the investor is therefore high on the international agenda. Contract farming is discussed as a possible solution but studies identifying the causal...

While research on subjective well-being abounds, comparatively little thought has been given to its practical policy implications. Two approaches to derive policy advice have emerged in the literature: One is organized in terms of the idea to maximize a hedonic social welfare function, the other...

We use a panel vector autoregressions model to examine the coevolution of changes in happiness and changes in income, health, marital status as well as employment status for the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set. This technique allows us to simultaneously analyze the impact of the...