This paper examines the impact of energy poverty on subjective well-being in Germany using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) over the period 2010-2023. Exploiting within-individual variation, we estimate fixed-effects models using objective, subjective, and composite...

Informal care is a cornerstone of long-term care for older adults but may entail substantial psychological costs for caregivers. Using seven waves (2004-2022) of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for 27 countries, we estimate the causal effect of providing regular...

Lifelong learning is increasingly recognized as important for individual well-being, but causal evidence on this relationship remains scarce. This paper evaluates the effects of non-formal adult education on life satisfaction by exploiting the substantial expansion of courses at East German...

This article investigates how regions' ability to pursue sustainable development trajectories affects individual subjective well-being. In particular, it disentangles the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability by examining the relative role of social capital, public safety, and...

We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective and current life evaluations, and apply it to unexploited archival data from...

This article investigates whether increasing economic status through adopting digital payment capabilities in Delhi fosters economic and financial inclusion among urban women street vendors in Mahila Haat. Digital freedom is a new step forward in technology for everyone. Still, a woman not only...

This study examines individuals' motivations for escaping and seeking in the context of nature-oriented sightseeing travel, with a specific focus on bus travel as the primary mode of transportation. While literature often examines these motivations through individual psychological processes or...

This report presents the construction and analysis of a Multidimensional Index (MDI) of Well-Being across four European countries ─ Sweden, Germany, Spain, and Poland ─ using EU-SILC cross-sectional survey data spanning 2004-2024. Based on the OECD well-being framework, the analysis covers...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been used as a proxy for human progress, despite growing recognition of its limitations. Recently, numerous "beyond GDP" initiatives have emerged, promoting multidimensional dashboards to assess quality of life. However, these often lack a clear headline...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been used as a proxy for human progress, despite growing recognition of its limitations. Recently, numerous "beyond GDP" initiatives have emerged, promoting multidimensional dashboards to assess quality of life. However, these often lack a clear headline...

This paper examines the dynamics of life satisfaction for a sample of young Irish adults before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Using longitudinal data from the Child cohort of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) survey we analyse changes in the Cantril ladder measure of life satisfaction...

I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The...

This article examines the impact of the Yemeni civil war on subjective well-being (SWB). Analyzing the relationship between regional war intensity and SWB for the period 2015-2023, while accounting for personal characteristics and regional fixed effects, we find a significant negative...

Lifelong learning is increasingly recognized as important for individual well-being, but causal evidence on this relationship remains scarce. This paper evaluates the effects of non-formal adult education on life satisfaction by exploiting the substantial expansion of courses at East German...

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly recognized as a transformative technology that is reshaping organizational processes, individual work practices, and workplace interactions. While its benefits for efficiency and productivity are widely acknowledged, its impact on...

Sick leave is a key indicator of labour market performance and public health, reflecting employee well-being and working conditions while creating a socioeconomic burden. Rates have increased in Europe due to ageing and shrinking workforces, yet research has focused mainly on medical risks, with...

We examine how functional-form assumptions affect conclusions about the existence of satiation in the relationship between income and emotional well-being. Previous studies have estimated a piecewise log-linear model with one structural break in both intercept and slope, which may lead to...

International and Irish studies have indicated negative trends in the mental health and wellbeing of young people over recent years. Indeed, the most recent wave of the Health Behaviour of School-Aged Children study shows that Ireland ranked 24 out of 36 countries on overall adolescent mental...

Can questions about life satisfaction be used to measure parental preferences for daughters versus sons? Daughter preference has rarely been documented in the literature, even in matrilineal settings. One possible reason is that the commonly used measures of parental gender preference, such as...

The health and well-being of parents raising children with disabilities is increasingly gaining importance in demographic and public health research. Caregiving responsibilities associated with childhood disability may create substantial emotional, physical, and social strain, potentially...

This paper provides updated evidence on the possibility of a virtuous cycle that, by prioritizing subjective well-being in decision making, would lead to socially and environmentally sustainable economies where individuals can thrive. We first argue that economic growth does not guarantee better...

Global reports suggest a decline in social connection, trust and wellbeing may be occurring for young people. Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, this study investigates the relationship between social capital and subjective wellbeing among...

There are numerous measures of place-based quality of life, accompanied by ongoing debate over which factors should be included. Past studies have predominately relied on aspatial, subjectively weighted combinations of different place-based characteristics. Little attention has been given to the...

When refugees flee abroad, they carry the legacy of their traumatic experiences across borders. While there are over 43 million refugees worldwide, the long-term effects of conflict exposure on their well-being remain poorly understood. This paper examines how pre-displacement exposure to...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on a prodigious corpus of human writing and may reveal human preferences over characteristics of life courses, such as income, longevity, and working conditions. We present OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and a broadly representative sample of Americans with pairs of...

This paper investigates child poverty in Germany through a multidimensional lens, combining Sen’s Capability Approach and Bourdieu’s Capital Theory to develop a adapted Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for children above 11 and youth aged 17. Drawing on data from the German...

This paper investigates the impact of South Korea's rapid robotization, driven by the country's proactive robotization policies, on subjective well-being using individual and householdlevel panel data. We measure individual exposure to robotization by estimating the probability that individuals...