How Much Does Money Really Matter? Estimating the Causal Effects of Income on Happiness

نویسنده

  • Nattavudh Powdthavee
چکیده

There is a long tradition of psychologists finding small income effects on life satisfaction (or happiness). Yet the issue of income endogeneity in life satisfaction equations has rarely been addressed. This paper aims to do just that. Instrumenting for income and allowing for unobserved heterogeneity result in an estimated income effect that is almost twice as large as the estimate in the basic specification. The results call for a reexamination on previous findings that suggest money buys little happiness, and a reevaluation on how the calculation of compensatory packages to various shocks in the individual’s life events should be designed.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Does money really matter? Estimating impacts of family income on young children's achievement with data from random-assignment experiments.

Social scientists do not agree on the size and nature of the causal impacts of parental income on children's achievement. We revisit this issue using a set of welfare and antipoverty experiments conducted in the 1990s. We utilize an instrumental variables strategy to leverage the variation in income and achievement that arises from random assignment to the treatment group to estimate the causal...

متن کامل

Globalization and Income Inequality: Does the Level of Financial Development Matter?

This paper examines the impact of globalization on income inequality in a panel of 78 developed and developing countries over 2002–2015. Moreover, the indirect effect of financial development in the link between globalization and income inequality is also analyzed by incorporating the interaction term between globalization and financial development. The empirical evidence based on the first-dif...

متن کامل

How Does Monetary Policy Affect Household Income Distribution?

Over the last decades the research on monetary policy has largely concentrated on the impact of monetary authorities’ decisions on inflation and the fine-tuning of the macroeconomic, so that distributional effects of monetary policy which are non-trivial has been ignored. A view that has become increasingly popular since the financial crisis 2008 is that expansionary monetary policy can exacerb...

متن کامل

Spending money on others promotes happiness.

Although much research has examined the effect of income on happiness, we suggest that how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. Specifically, we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. Providing converging evidence for this hypothesis, we found that spending more o...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2009