We study the co-evolution of social participation and social capital accumulation, taking the view that the former contributes to the latter, and both contribute to socially enjoyed leisure. We show that a process of substitution of private for social activities (observable in some advanced, affluent economies), might be self-reinforcing and lead to a Pareto-dominated steady state. We find some...

This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengths of this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues are addressed. Moreover, it is applied to estimate utility losses cause...

In this paper, we shed more light on the subjective well-being of workfare participants and compare it to the well-being of unemployed and employed workers. We use data from a selfconducted survey among participants in workfare schemes in Germany. We examine two subdimensions of subjective well-being – life satisfaction and emotional well-being – separately to obtain a more comprehensive view o...

This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengths of this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues are addressed. Moreover, it is applied to estimate utility losses cause...

This paper demonstrates that institutional factors influence the subjective well-being of individuals differently in rich versus poor countries. A lower level of corruption, a more democratic government and better civil rights increase the well-being of individuals in rich countries, whereas an increase in per capita income has no impact. On the contrary, in poor countries the extent of corrupt...

Instability, proxied by individual level data on satisfaction, is measured, its association with inequality is investigated, and the socio-economic determinants of overall satisfaction are modelled. A very recent national representative household survey (2002) with a module designed to serve this purpose has been the statistics source of this study. The results point to the role of income growt...

© A m Abstract: Very little is understood about how immigrants affect the happiness, or subjective well-being of natives. We use the European Social Survey to analyze the effects of aggregate immigration flows on the subjective well-being of native-born populations in a panel of 26 countries between 2002 and 2010. We find that recent immigrant flows have a nonlinear, yet overall positive impact...

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 illus...

We discuss a class of copula-based ordered probit models with endogenous switching. Such models can be useful for the analysis of self-selection in subjective well-being equations in general, and job satisfaction in particular, where assignment of regressors may be endogenous rather than random, resulting from individual maximization of well-being. In an application to public and private sector...

This study analyses the physical stature of runaway apprentices and military deserters based on advertisements collected from 18-century newspapers, in order to explore the biological welfare of colonial and early-national Americans. The results indicate that heights declined somewhat at mid-century, but increased substantially thereafter. The findings are generally in keeping with trends in mo...