The U-shape of happiness in Scotland

We examine well-being in Scotland using micro data from the Scottish Health Survey and the UK Annual Population Surveys. We find evidence of a midlife nadir or zenith in Scotland in well-being at around age 50 using a variety of measures of both happiness and unhappiness. We confirm that higher consumption of fruit and vegetables is associated with higher levels of happiness in Scotland. We compare this with evidence for England from the Health Survey of England. The decline in well-being between youth and midlife is comparable in size to the loss of a spouse or of a job and around half of the fall in well-being in the COVID-19 lockdown. We also find a midlife peak in suicides in Scotland. Despite higher mortality and suicide rates in Scotland than in England, paradoxically we find that the Scots are happier than the English. Northern Ireland is the happiest of the four home countries. We also find evidence of U-shapes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the mid to late forties.     

The silver linings of lottery play: motivation and subjective well-being of British lottery participants

Although certain researchers have attributed widespread lottery play to irrational beliefs that people hold regarding the chances of winning the lottery, another explanation for the popularity of lottery gambling is that lottery players may experience positive emotions before the draw. Therefore, in this study, we examine the relationship between lottery participation and happiness. Using data from the British Gambling Prevalence Survey 2010 and utilizing propensity score matching methods, we find a small positive effect of lottery participation on happiness for individuals who engage in lottery play for recreational purposes.     

Local Area Inequality and Worker Well-Being

This paper uses General Social Survey data linked to Census data to investigate the effect of local area income and income inequality on worker well-being. Others have found a robust negative correlation between reference group income and self-reported well-being. However, in many cases the reference group is defined as a large geographic area. This paper adds to the literature in two ways. First, it considers multiple nested geographic reference groups with US data. Second, it explicitly considers income inequality in addition to the level of income. It is found that both income and income inequality are positively associated with well-being at the census tract level, but negatively associated at the county level. Further, the effect of inequality on well-being decreases as income increases at the census tract and county level, while it increases at the state level.     

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.     

The determinants of marital happiness

This study contributes to the literature by providing an empirical analysis of the determinants of marital and general happiness. The empirical analysis is conducted using US data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and an Ordered Probit Model. We also attempt to overcome the endogeneity problem between marital happiness and infidelity using a recursive bivariate probit model. One of the advances of this study is to show that the determinants of marital happiness differ between men and women in interesting ways. While infidelity has similar effects for both sexes, we find that women have a detectable preference for a traditional division of labour within the household. In addition, social class, religion, age, children and income have differential effects between men and women. In particular, for marital happiness we find diminishing returns from household income for women and satiation for men. Hence, we find that most of the existing literature has left hidden important differences in the determinants of marital happiness between men and women.     

Subjective well-being in China: direct and indirect effects of rural-to-urban migrant status

The purpose of this article is to provide a recent investigation on the determinants of subjective well-being among Chinese adults, with particular emphasis on internal migrants who hold a rural hukou and have settled in cities. Based on a sample of 7846 adults stemming from the 2011 wave of CHNS survey, we estimate different happiness functions using ordered probit regressions. We first confirm the influence of traditional demographic and socioeconomic characteristics (i.e. age, marital status, gender, illness/injury, income, and education). Second, our results emphasize the importance of taking into account regional differences, but also the positive impact of leisure time and social connections. Finally, our results highlight that being a rural-to-urban migrant is significantly associated with a decrease in the probability of reporting good or very good life satisfaction. We show that this relationship seems to be shaped by direct and indirect effects, and we identify the mediating role of regional patterns and social relations.     

What Does Dynamic Panel Analysis Tell Us About Life Satisfaction?

Static fixed effects estimation of life satisfaction often gives rise to serial correlation in the residuals, indicating omitted dynamics. Rather than correcting the standard errors, “to make them robust,” this study explores dynamic panel analysis to incorporate the otherwise omitted dynamics into the estimation of life satisfaction models. The analysis utilizes the System General Method of Moments approach to dynamic analysis. The results indicate that overall life satisfaction is largely (though not wholly) contemporaneous; correspondingly, the persistence of satisfaction from previous periods is limited. This finding is robust to a variety of different specification choices. Accordingly, the issue of omitted dynamics in a life satisfaction context is a minor one. This use of dynamic panel analysis, therefore, offers support for the ongoing use of static models (like fixed effects), even though they omit dynamics. Given the highlighted challenges of dynamic panel analysis, static fixed effects analyses will often be preferred.     

Income growth,redistribution, and subjective well-being in Taiwan – a simulation study

This study simulates different income growth and income distribution scenarios in Taiwan in 2001, and examines how social happiness and people's happiness at different income levels change. Without taking downward comparison into consideration, the simulation supports income redistribution in favour of the poor. When the downward comparison is taken into consideration, the simulation does not support any kind of income redistribution. The present study investigates the relationship between income inequality and subjective well-being, and shows that a change in the Gini index can be interpreted in terms of a shift in revealed subjective well-being.     

浅谈幸福

在西方,从柏拉图的理念论世界观开始,经斯多葛派的宿命论到中世纪的宗教神学,有关幸福思想的相同之处均为片面强调幸福只是精神需求的满足,主观上贬低甚至排斥物质享受。历史上,各派哲学家关于幸福问题争论不休,提出了多种不同的观点和看法,形成了各执一词的幸福观,有禁欲主义、快乐主义、全面幸福论等幸福观。     

The Lasting Well-Being Effects of Early Adulthood Macroeconomic Crises

This paper studies the effects of macroeconomic crises experienced in early adulthood on subjective well-being (SWB) later in life. Using repeated cross-sectional survey data of over 100,000 individuals from 38 countries around the world combined with historical data on macroeconomic circumstances, I find that having experienced a macroeconomic crisis at ages 18–25 is detrimental to SWB. This result is in line with earlier literature that focuses on other individual-level outcomes. However, the analysis presented in this paper reveals that outcomes related to individual’s earnings, employment status, family life, and religion cannot fully explain the lasting effect of macroeconomic crises on well-being. Results on heterogeneous responses show that the negative effect is largest for females and for individuals with low educational attainment.     

Happiness Research: State and Prospects

This paper intends to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and in which interesting directions it might develop. First, the current state of the research on happiness in economics is briefly discussed. We emphasize the potential of happiness research in testing competing theories of individual behavior. Second, the crucial issue of causality is taken up illustrating it for a particular case, namely whether marriage makes people happy or whether happy people get married. Third, happiness research is taken up as a new approach to measuring utility in the context of cost-benefit analysis.     

Rhythms and cycles in happiness

This study analyses time-dependent rhythms in happiness in three aspects. We show that the Sunday neurosis exists exclusively for men with a medium level of education and both men and women with high levels of education. Men with high levels of education may even experience a weekend neurosis. This study is the first to test for intra-monthly rhythms and to demonstrate that men with a lower educational background may suffer from negative effects on happiness towards the end of the month, potentially because of liquidity problems. The study is also the first to demonstrate that happiness exhibits seasonal effects over the annual period, depending on gender and education.     

Education and happiness: an alternative hypothesis

Recent research has documented a negative relationship between education and happiness. We test the hypothesis that the extent to which education makes an individual happy depends on their current age in life. We find suggestive evidence that people with higher education are more likely to be happier, on average, than their less educated counterparts starting in their early to mid-30s.     

员工福利与幸福感关系分析

随着经济社会不断发展,员工对福利的要求更加多元化,企业对满足员工福利,提升员工幸福感也更为重视。如何制定合理的福利制度,进而提升员工的幸福感,促进员工更好为企业创造价值是每个企业必须重视的问题。通过文献查询、调研分析等方法,将员工福利进行了科学划分,对各类福利与员工幸福感的关系进行了分析,并对企业如何通过建立合理的福利制度来提升员工幸福感提出了建议,为企业完善福利制度,提升员工幸福感水平提供了依据。     

If You're Happy and You Know It: How Do Mothers and Fathers in the US Really Feel about Caring for Their Children?

This paper considers the question posed by popular media: Do women like doing childcare more than men? Using contemporaneous subjective well-being data paired with 24-hour time diaries from the 2010 American Time Use Survey, the paper explores gender differences in how mothers and fathers feel when engaged in a set of common daily activities. We find that both mothers and fathers engaged in child caregiving enjoy their time spent in child caregiving; fathers as much, or even more so, than mothers as evidenced by their average values for happiness, meaningfulness, tiredness, and stress and an aggregated statistic, the unpleasantness index. Simulations provide evidence that the difference between mothers and fathers comes almost completely from differences in their subjective well-being rather than from differences in how they use their time.     

Impact of unemployment on happiness in the United States

This study considers the level of demonstrated happiness and unhappiness, the latter measured by the conditional probability of committing suicide within groups that are facing a higher unemployment rate and those that are not. Using individual-level US data from 1989 to 2004, our findings indicate that individuals have lower rates of suicide or are ‘happy’ when they live in a state that has lower unemployment rate.     

Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy and the economics of happiness

Abstract

Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy is especially well-known in recent economic studies on happiness. However, his insightful contributions have not been taken up as they deserve, mainly because they were, and still are, too original. By reconstructing Scitovsky's analysis on the basis of all his relevant writings, this article integrates his most original concepts, such as novelty, consumption skill, endogenous preferences, pleasurable uncertainty, into conventional economics; it compares Scitovsky's analysis to the economic thought of his time and to current consumer theory and it reveals his contributions to happiness economics, such as an original interpretation of the Easterlin paradox.     

Increasing consumer well-being: risk as potential driver of happiness

This article investigates the relation between risk and individual well-being. We propose a theoretical model of happiness that makes a distinction between ex ante evaluations of happiness and ex post assessments. The main assumptions of the model are tested through three studies based on anchoring vignettes. We show that, even if, ex ante, consumers fear high risk and do not associate it to a high level of happiness, their ex post evaluation of well-being is generally higher when identical consequences result from a high-risk situation than from a low-risk situation. Control over risk-taking reinforces the gap between ex ante and ex post measures of happiness. Thus, our article provides empirical evidence about a positive relation between risk and individual well-being, suggesting that risky experiences have the potential to increase consumer well-being.     

论企业行为对社会幸福的影响

改革开放以来,社会经济飞速发展,社会财富迅猛增加,人民生活水平也有了一定的提高。在这一背景下,虽然社会整体发展状况良好,社会成员的生活质量有了显著的提高,但是人们对于生活幸福度的感知及认同并不高,并表现出不同的状态。这有可能引发出各种社会问题。特别是对于工作待遇的担忧、食品安全的担心、生活环境的困扰,等等。因此,分析了企业行为对社会幸福的双重影响,并就这些影响做出了深入分析,提出了如何在企业行为与社会幸福之间建立起有机联系的思考。