Life Satisfaction Dynamics with Quarterly Life Event Data*

Using life satisfaction responses from Australian panel data we examine the questions of when and to what extent individuals are affected by major positive and negative life events, including changes in financial situation, marital status, death of a close relative, and being the victim of crime. The key advantage of our data is that we are able to identify these events on a quarterly basis rather than on the yearly basis used by previous studies. We find evidence that life events are not randomly distributed, that individuals anticipate major events to a large extent, and that they fully adapt to many events within 12 months. The estimates can be used to calculate monetary values needed to compensate individuals for life events. Using a new valuation methodology that incorporates these dynamic factors produces considerably smaller compensation valuations than those calculated using the standard approach.     

Subjective well-being and its determinants in rural China

A national household survey for 2002, containing a specially designed module on subjective well-being, is used to estimate pioneering happiness functions in rural China. The variables that are predicted by economic theory to be important for happiness prove to be relatively unimportant. Our analysis suggests that we need to draw on psychology and sociology if we are to understand. Rural China is not a hotbed of dissatisfaction with life, possibly because most people are found to confine their reference groups to the village. Relative income within the village and relative income over time, both in the past and expected in the future, are shown to be important for current happiness, whereas current income is less so. Even amidst the poverty of rural China, attitudes, social comparisons and aspirations influence subjective well-being. The implications of the findings for the future and for policy are considered.     

Lost in transition: Life satisfaction on the road to capitalism

In the 1990s transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe life satisfaction followed the collapse and recovery of GDP, but failed to recover commensurately. By 2005, with GDP averaging about 25 per cent above its early 1990s level, life satisfaction was typically back to its earlier level, but was arguably still below pre-transition values. Increased satisfaction with material living levels occurred at the expense of decreased satisfaction with work, health, and family life. In the decade of the 1990s, disparities in life satisfaction increased with those hardest hit being the less educated and persons over age 30; women and men suffered about equally.     

Happiness and declining inframarginal values

I accept the broad findings of happiness studies on the longitudinal and cross-sectional relationships between income and happiness, and argue that standard demand curve analysis is inconsistent with those findings. This inconsistency is overcome with a simple dynamic modification to the standard demand curve that assumes the psychological adaptation to consuming a good is captured by declining values of inframarginal units. I argue that this modification is consistent with two evolutionary considerations related to happiness and that it has interesting implications for such things as anticipation and happiness, apparent anomalies in discounting the future, the connection between World War II and the end of the Great Depression, and the possibility of increasing our happiness by moderating our consumption.      

Impact of income tax on happiness: evidence from the United States

The present work considers the level of demonstrated happiness and unhappiness within groups, the latter measured by the conditional probability of suicide within groups facing an income tax rate and those without. Using US data for the year 2004, our results show that individuals have lower rates of suicide or are ‘happy’ when they do not pay income taxes than those who pay.     

Theory of negative consumption externalities with applications to the economics of happiness

This paper investigates the problem of obtaining Pareto efficient allocations in the presence of negative consumption externalities. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, we show that even if consumers’ preferences are monotonically increasing in their own consumption, one may have to dispose of resources to achieve Pareto efficiency when negative consumption externalities exist. We provide characterization results on destruction both for pure exchange economies and for production economies. As an application, our results provide an explanation to Easterlin’s paradox: average happiness levels do not increase as countries grow wealthier. We thank an anonymous referee, Xiaoyong Cao, Li Gan, and Tapan Mitra for helpful comments and suggestions that improved the exposition of the paper. The first author thanks the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University for financial support.     

War and well-being in transition: Evidence from two natural experiments

This paper assesses the effect of the Russo–Georgian conflict of 2008 and the Ukrainian–Russian conflict of 2014 on the well-being of minorities in Russia. Using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), we find that the well-being of Georgians in Russia suffered negatively from the 2008 Russo–Georgian conflict. We show that the conflict has no direct effect on the labor market outcomes of Georgians, and therefore, we attribute the negative effect of conflict on well-being to more indirect channels such as fear, altruism, or sympathy. In comparison, we find no general effect of the Ukrainian–Russian conflict of 2014 on the Ukrainian nationals’ happiness. However, the life satisfaction of Ukrainians who reside in the southern regions of Russia in close proximity to Ukraine is negatively affected. We also show that the negative effect of conflict is short-lived with no long-term legacy. Additionally, we analyze the spillover effects of conflict on other minorities in Russia. We find that while the well-being of non-slavic and migrant minorities who have recently moved to Russia is negatively affected, there is no effect on local minorities who have been living in Russia for at least ten years.     

价值视域中的社会发展代价之幸福感指数

幸福与和谐,是人类永恒追求的具有普遍意义的终极价值。社会和谐是人民幸福的基本条件,幸福指数是社会和谐的重要指标。正因为幸福和快乐对于人类来说是一种永恒的终极的价值目标,追求幸福和快乐是人与生俱来的基本权利。     

生态旅游村居民幸福指数测评——以四川省德阳市罗江县凤雏村为例

尝试用"幸福指数"这一新的理论研究国内正在发展中的生态旅游,构建了详细的社区居民幸福指数指标体系。通过满意度信息的收集方式和样本量作为确定依据,提出了计算社区居民满意度的方法。同时选择对四川省德阳市罗江县生态旅游村凤雏村社区居民进行幸福指数测评,统计计算出该区居民的幸福指数,验证了引入的幸福指数这一新概念可以解决衡量社区居民获得的利益,生活是否幸福这一课题。通过分析其结果还可以为社区生态旅游的可持续发展提供一些建议或指导。     

The role of natural capital in supporting national income and social welfare

Using life satisfaction as a proxy for social welfare, this study contributes to the extant literature by empirically demonstrating that natural capital contributes to social welfare, functioning in part through increasing national income and in part through its direct effect on life satisfaction; the direct effect is approximately 40% greater than the indirect effect. This suggests that the true welfare benefits of natural capital may not be adequately reflected in conventional economic data and, therefore, studies seeking to evaluate the contribution of natural capital to human well-being should consider employing data sets that capture subjective elements of welfare. The magnitudes of the reported marginal effects of natural capital on social welfare, however, are small. This is perhaps due to the fact that (1) there are shortcomings in the measure of natural capital; (2) life satisfaction effects are unlikely to reflect the poorly understood benefits that natural capital provides; and (3) keystone species (such as mosquitoes) and integral ecosystems (such as wetlands) may be negatively associated with life satisfaction, even though such components of natural capital are vitally important to sustaining ecosystems and human life