Macroeconomic conditions and well-being: do social interactions matter?

We investigate the role played by social interactions in the transmission of the effects of macroeconomic conditions on well-being. Using survey data for a representative sample of Italian individuals, we find that social interactions play a dual role. On the one hand, the well-being of people who spend more time with their friends or go out more often is less sensitive to macroeconomic fluctuations. On the other hand, social interactions are negatively affected by worsening macroeconomic conditions, thus playing a relevant role in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks to subjective well-being. More specifically, the negative impact of downturns on the frequency of going out and active participation in associations significantly contributes to the adverse effects of recessions on satisfaction with life and with individual life domains.     

The social costs of unemployment: accounting for unemployment duration

This article contributes to the literature on unemployment and well-being by investigating the linkage between personal life satisfaction and a macroeconomic indicator of the duration of unemployment. Using data for more than 50?000 individuals in 10 European countries, 1992–2002, we find that the social costs of unemployment, in terms of general unemployment's impact on life satisfaction, relate significantly and to a considerable extent to unemployment duration. It is thus not just the risk of becoming or staying unemployed that people worry about, but especially the prospect of staying long-term unemployed. This fear affects employed and unemployed people alike. Our findings provide a strong point for focusing labour market policies on long-term unemployment, in addition to considerations of human capital depreciation.     

Adaptive Preferences and Capabilities: Some Preliminary Conceptual Explorations

The Capability Approach (CA) as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has in part been a response to the problem of adaptive preferences. Their argument says that people might adapt to certain unfavorable circumstances and any self-evaluation in terms of satisfaction or happiness will in this case necessarily be distorted. To evaluate people's well-being in terms of functionings and capabilities guarantees a more objective picture of people's life. Next to this strong criticism on subjective measurements of well-being, we observe an increasing interest in Subjective Well-Being (SWB) or Happiness studies that are included in the broader field of Hedonic Psychology. In this paper, we thus revise the original critique of adaptive preferences and compare it with a more detailed analysis of adaptation as it is presented in hedonic psychology. It becomes clear that adaptation can be a positive as well as a negative phenomenon and that the adaptive preference critique had a particular narrow view on adaptation. However, this does not mean SWB-research is not any longer susceptible to this critique. An alternative way to assess people's subjective well-being, but which could be considered to be more in line with the CA, is proposed by Daniel Kahneman's Objective Happiness. These are all relatively new considerations, especially in economics. Therefore much more research needs to be done on the positive and negative aspects of adaptation to understand its consequences on well-being – especially when evaluated within the capability-space.     

Job insecurity,employability and health: an analysis for Germany across generations

In this article, we use 12 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) to examine the relationship between job insecurity, employability and health-related well-being. Our results indicate that being unemployed has a strong negative effect on life satisfaction and health. They also, however, highlight the fact that this effect is most prominent among individuals over the age of 40. A second observation is that job insecurity is also associated with lower levels of life satisfaction and health, and this association is quite strong. This negative effect of job insecurity is, in many cases, exacerbated by poor employability.     

Optimal Workfare with Voluntary and Involuntary Unemployment*

This paper addresses the welfare implications of introducing workfare into unemployment benefit policy. We consider a population composed of employed and unemployed workers and of individuals who do not seek employment. Job search behavior is unobservable, which means that voluntarily unemployed individuals can claim unemployment insurance (UI) benefits intended for unemployed workers. As a consequence, pecuniary benefit schemes underinsure workers against unemployment. We show that requiring unproductive activities (workfare) in exchange for UI benefits may generate a Pareto improvement by facilitating better unemployment insurance for workers, and we characterize the situations where this is the case.     

Happiness, geography and the environment

In recent years, economists have been using socio-economic and socio-demographic characteristics to explain self-reported individual happiness or satisfaction with life. Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), we employ data disaggregated at the individual and local level to show that while these variables are important, consideration of amenities such as climate, environmental and urban conditions is critical when analyzing subjective well-being. Location-specific factors are shown to have a direct impact on life satisfaction. Most importantly, however, the explanatory power of our happiness function substantially increases when the spatial variables are included, highlighting the importance of the role of the spatial dimension in determining well-being.     

城乡分割、就业状况与主观幸福感差异

本文讨论了不同人群主观幸福感的影响因素,并在对概率模型进行分解分析的基础上,对城乡之间以及城镇失业与就业居民之间的主观幸福感差异进行了比较分析。本文的结论发现,农村居民的主观幸福感高于城镇居民主要是由于预期的满足程度、收入变化预期、对生活状态改善的评价等差异所引起的;城镇失业与就业居民的主观幸福感差异则主要是由收入效应导致的。     

Subjective well‐being and aggregate unemployment: further evidence

According to the literature, individual well‐being is negatively related to aggregate unemployment. This study examines whether the distribution of aggregate unemployment by duration affects well‐being, in addition to the level of unemployment. Different explanations are provided to indicate how the shares of short‐term (up to 3 months) and long‐term (more than 1 year) unemployed people could affect the well‐being of the employed and unemployed. Using data from almost 300,000 individuals from 11 EU countries, we find significant effects of both shares on life satisfaction. Among the unemployed, for example, we find a U‐shaped effect of the distribution of aggregate unemployment by duration on subjective well‐being, which compensates to some extent for the negative effect of the unemployment rate.     

Labour Supply,Life Satisfaction,and the (Dis)Utility of Work*

In economic theory, it is typically assumed that there is a “disutility of labour”. However, empirical research on subjective well‐being has consistently shown that unemployed people are less happy than employed people, even after taking income differences into account. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile both findings. We show that happiness and work hours exhibit an inverse U‐shaped relation – working longer raises the level of happiness, as long as the total working time is not too long. Hence, working can be beneficial for happiness and, at the same time, it can exert a disutility at the margin.     

城乡分割、就业状况与主观幸福感差异

本文讨论了不同人群主观幸福感的影响因素，并在对概率模型进行分解分析的基础上，对城乡之间以及城镇失业与就业居民之间的主观幸福感差异进行了比较分析。本文的结论发现，农村居民的主观幸福感高于城镇居民主要是由于预期的满足程度、收入变化预期、对生活状态改善的评价等差异所引起的；城镇失业与就业居民的主观幸福感差异则主要是由收入效应导致的。     

城乡居民主观幸福差异及其影响因素研究——以成都市为例

在对成都市433名城区、郊区和农村居民的结构式访问基础上,以"整体生活满意度"和"具体生活满意度"作为主观幸福的核心维度,运用方差分析、多元回归分析方法,对城乡居民的主观幸福差异及其影响因素进行了分析。城乡居民主观幸福在一些维度上存在明显差异,在另一些维度上没有显著差异;城乡居民存在着增进和损害其各自主观幸福的条件和因素,这些条件和因素包括工作状况、家庭收入、居住条件、家庭生活、人际关系、闲暇活动、健康状况、生活城市等。     

Interior immigration enforcement policy and the subjective well-being of US residents: evidence from secure communities

There were increased efforts to enhance interior enforcement of immigration laws in the United States in recent years. Considering that more interior immigration enforcement measures are going to be proposed in the near future, there is a need to evaluate whether such policy can achieve its objective and imparts some benefits to the population it is supposed to help. In this article, I examine the impact of one of the largest interior immigration enforcement effort – Secure Communities – on the subjective well-being of US residents. The analyses show that there is no evidence that Secure Communities statistically significantly increased the proportion of white or black non-Hispanics reporting that they were satisfied with their life. Evaluated at the mean, at 10% significance level, the results suggest that I can rule out an effect size larger than 0.5% and 1% for white and black non-Hispanics, respectively. Since only a small share of white or black non-Hispanics are foreign-born, this finding suggests that the benefit of Secure Communities to US-born individuals that are coming through an increase in their life satisfaction is not economically large.     

The Social Connectedness and Life Satisfaction Nexus: A Panel Data Analysis of Women in Australia

This study explores the interplay between time pressures at home and at work, social connectedness, and well-being as reported by Australian women. Specifically, taking advantage of longitudinal data (from the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey for the years 2001 to 2013) and employing the newly developed “blow up and cluster” estimation technique, this study finds there has been a marginal decline in the life satisfaction of Australian women. After accounting for changes in sociodemographic characteristics, a more pervasive negative trend in life satisfaction appears to be reported by both men and women, and both genders report higher levels of life satisfaction for greater levels of almost all measures of social connectedness. This study adds to a growing body of evidence pointing toward the importance of frequent and meaningful social connections to societal well-being, as well as the need to refocus attention on well-being in public-policy spheres.     

Shocked by therapy? Unemployment in the first years of the socio-economic transition in Poland and its long-term consequences

We examine the long-term implications of unemployment for material conditions and well-being using the Polish sample from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Retrospective data from the SHARELIFE survey are used to reconstruct labour market experiences across the threshold of the socio-economic transformation from a centrally planned to a free market economy in Poland. These individual experiences are matched with outcomes observed in the survey about 20 years later to examine their correlation with unemployment at the time of the transition. We find that becoming unemployed in the early 1990s correlates significantly with income, assets and a number of measures of well-being recorded in 2007 and 2012. Using plant closures to reflect exogenous changes to labour market status at the time of the transition, we are able to confirm the causal effect of unemployment on income and house ownership 20 years later, but find no evidence for a long-term causal relationship between unemployment and such measures of well-being as life satisfaction, depression and subjective assessment of material conditions.     

Who benefits from big government? A life satisfaction approach

Which impact does government size have on life satisfaction, and how do effects of bigger government differ between income groups in society? Previous studies typically employed country averages and thus neglected possibly heterogeneous happiness effects between income groups. This paper addresses empirically the effects of government spending on subjective well-being of individuals belonging to different income groups. Our analysis is based on individual data from 25 European countries participating in the European Social Survey. In contrast to most previous studies we take account of the endogeneity between relative income position and reported life satisfaction by an instrumental variable approach. Our results suggest, first, that most government spending categories, including social protection, are on average negatively related to individual well-being. Secondly, estimated marginal effects of health, education and social protection spending at different income levels show that spending increases always have a stronger negative effect on high income groups’ well-being than on low income groups’ life satisfaction. For all government spending categories, marginal happiness effects of higher public spending are clearly negative for income groups at the top.     

Extreme bounds of subjective well-being: economic development and micro determinants of life satisfaction

This article presents a global sensitivity analysis of micro determinants of life satisfaction (LS), a subjective well-being (SWB) measure of quality of life, as it relates to economic development. We test 53 micro variables using extreme bound analysis on a pooled cross-section data from the World Value Survey representing 98 countries between 1989 and 2014. Several standard variables frequently included in SWB regressions are controlled for. The test variables are broadly categorized as demographic, personal–economic, individual traits and values, social attitudes and collectivism, social relationships and perceptions of control. We find subjective health status, household income rank, family savings, religiosity, most perceptions of control and several social attitudes and collectivism measures to be universal LS determinants. Generally, the determinants of LS vary by a country’s level of economic development. In particular, we provide suggestive evidence that as countries develop, certain needs are satisfied and stop being important contributors to LS while others take their place.     

Workfare in an efficiency wage model

The impacts of introducing work requirements for welfare recipients are studied in an efficiency wage model. If the workfare package is not mandatory, it will reduce employment, profits, and utility levels of employed and unemployed workers. In contrast, mandatory effort requirements will generally raise both employment and profits and reduce the tax rate. The impact on the net wage is ambiguous. Changes of utility levels of employed and unemployed workers have the same sign as the variation in the net wage. The possibility of a Pareto improvement may explain the widespread support for welfare to work experiments.      

广东贫困县老年人主观幸福感调研报告

通过调查分析广东丰顺县（省级贫困县）老年人的生活状况、主观幸福感,探究影响贫困山区老年人幸福感的因素。以丰顺县210位老人（年龄大于60岁）作为研究对象,以坎贝尔幸福指数量表和自编的老年人一般资料调查表作为测量工具,进行方差分析、相关分析、多元回归分析等。结果显示210位老年人平均幸福感指数为10．52±1．891,相对较高,1995年国内姚春生等人所做测试,幸福感指数全量表分数（X±SD）仅为5．1159±2．0282。数据分析显示,老年人婚姻状况、子女数量、养老环境、身体状况、受教育程度、兴趣爱好、自我价值感、自我效能感、家庭关系、其他社会人际关系、经济收入、社会关注与支持以及宗教信仰等因素对老年人主观幸福感影响差异显著。而年龄和性别因素对老年人主观幸福感的影响差异不显著。     

Income comparison,gender roles and life satisfaction

This article uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to analyse the effect of within household income comparison on individual life satisfaction. Our within couple and individual fixed-effects panel estimates suggest that gender roles influence subjective well-being (SWB). A primary breadwinner wife decreases a couple’s individual happiness by eight per cent. The article adds to the findings on interdependence of SWB and hints at negative consequences of traditional gender identity norms for individual happiness.     

Well-being effects of extreme weather events in the United States

The increase in weather and climate disasters in recent years has prompted an interest in analyzing their consequences and the mitigation and adaptation measures that can help minimize their potentially large impacts on individuals’ welfare. We match thirty-one billion-dollar disasters with individual survey data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to estimate the effect of extreme weather events on the subjective well-being of U.S. residents. Our results indicate that natural disasters have a negative and robust impact on subjective well-being in the affected communities, and that, on average, this impact peaks 6 months after the event, and then decays over time. We then investigate the attenuating impact of health care access, flood insurance, and governmental assistance programs and find a partial compensating role for risk-transfer and relief measures. We also find that stronger emotional and social support mitigates the negative impact of natural disasters.