Estimating worldwide life satisfaction

Whilst studies of life satisfaction are becoming more common-place, their global coverage is far from complete. This paper develops a new database of life satisfaction scores for 178 countries, bringing together subjective well-being data from four surveys and using stepwise regression to estimate scores for nations where no subjective data are available. In doing so, we explore various factors that predict between-nation variation in subjective life satisfaction, building on Vemuri and Costanza's (Vemuri, A.W., & Costanza, R., 2006. The role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country level: toward a National Well-Being Index (NWI). Ecological Economics, 58:119-133.) four capitals model. The main regression model explains 76% of variation in existing subjective scores; importantly, this includes poorer nations that had proven problematic in Vemuri and Costanza's (Vemuri, A.W., & Costanza, R., 2006. The role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country level: toward a National Well-Being Index (NWI). Ecological Economics, 58:119-133.) study. Natural, human and socio-political capitals are all found to be strong predictors of life satisfaction. Built capital, operationalised as GDP, did not enter our regression model, being overshadowed by the human capital and socio-political capital factors that it inter-correlates with. The final database presents a stop-gap resource that, until robust surveys are carried out worldwide, allows comparisons of subjective life satisfaction between nations to be made with reasonable confidence.     

Formal institutions and subjective well-being: Revisiting the cross-country evidence

A long tradition in economics explores the association between the quality of formal institutions and economic performance. The literature on the relationship between such institutions and happiness is, however, rather limited, and inconclusive. In this paper, we revisit the findings from recent cross-country studies on the institution–happiness association. Our findings suggest that their conclusions are qualitatively rather insensitive to the specific measure of ‘happiness’ used, while the associations between formal institutions and subjective well-being differ among poor and rich countries. Separating different types of institutional quality, we find that in low-income countries the effects of economic–judicial institutions on happiness dominate those of political institutions, while analyses restricted to middle- and high-income countries show strong support for an additional beneficial effect of political institutions. Our results bear important implications that we discuss in the concluding section of the paper.     

回顾与反思：金融危机给企业员工造成了什么影响？

回顾与反思了金融危机对企业员工所造成的影响。在金融危机期间调查了长三角地区25家不同企业的548名企业员工。在调查研究的基础上,分析了金融危机对企业员工的工作、收入、投资、消费、储蓄等方面的具体影响,并进一步分析了金融危机对企业员工的心理影响。根据调查研究,反思了危机冲击的＂桥头堡现象＂,提出了＂危机保护因子＂假说,认为应当加强关于危机的理论与策略研究,建立心理预警机制,加强员工心理培训工作,建设＂以人为本＂的优秀企业文化,实施员工援助计划等措施,从而提高员工抵御危机的能力,维持员工心理健康水平。     

Are Gulf stock markets efficient? Evidence from new multiple variance ratio tests

The purpose of this article is to test for the Random Walk Hypothesis (RWH) for seven stock markets in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and to determine the effect of the correction for thin trading. Three new multiple variance ratio tests are applied to both observed returns and returns corrected for thin trading. It is found overall that the RWH does not hold for the GCC stock markets at both daily and weekly frequencies. This evidence is particularly strong when daily returns are used, where the RWH is soundly rejected for both observed and corrected returns.     

PPP test for Asian countries and regions: new evidence from a wild bootstrap AESTAR test

This article investigates the effects of time-varying variance on the asymmetric exponential smooth transition autoregressive (AESTAR) unit root test. We propose a wild bootstrap-based implementation of the test, which is asymptotically valid under time-varying variance. We apply our proposed method to test the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis for Asian countries and regions, and find that our proposed test provides stronger evidence against the PPP hypothesis than the conventional AESTAR test.     

Changes in health-related quality of life: a compensating income variation approach

This paper investigates the relationship between negative changes in health and life satisfaction, using a sample from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia Survey. We use panel data models and estimate the life satisfaction impact of several different changes in health status to calculate the Compensating Income Variation (CIV) of them. Our work innovates with respect to the existing literature by using a more robust CIV method that takes account of the potential measurement error in income. Further, we produce the first set of monetary values for health losses using SF-6D utility values, one of the main measures used to estimate and value health change for economic evaluation. We show that negative changes in SF-6D are significantly associated with a reduction in life satisfaction, and the starting point matters: a drop of 0.1 in SF-6D score is associated with a decrease of 0.12 points in life satisfaction if the starting utility value is 0.8, but the effect is 100% higher if the SF-6D starting point is 0.7. More generally, we find that a 0.1 deterioration in SF-6D has a strong association with life satisfaction and that the CIV value is substantial (over US$ 120,000).     

Life satisfaction and self-employment in different types of occupations

In this research, we investigate whether a positive relationship between life satisfaction and self-employment (versus paid employment) exists while simultaneously considering two occupational dimensions: white-collar versus blue-collar work and high-skilled versus low-skilled work. Using Eurobarometer data for a large number of European countries (2008–2012), our findings confirm that self-employed workers are more satisfied with their lives than paid employees are. A life satisfaction premium is also found when the self-employed and paid employees are compared within similar occupations in terms of collar type and skill level. Finally, self-employment can help to overcome low life satisfaction scores associated with blue-collar and low-skilled work.     

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。     

Does terrorism reduce life satisfaction?

We study the effect of terrorism on life satisfaction for a sample of 81 countries over the 1994–2009 period. We find that terrorism is robustly associated with less life satisfaction. This effect, however, translates into only modest social costs.