The authors argue that the strength of the relationship between income and happiness can be influenced by exposure to organizational practices, such as being paid by the hour, that promote an economic evaluation of time use. Using cross-sectional data from the United States, two studies found that income was more strongly associated with happiness for individuals paid by the hour compared to th...

OBJECTIVES We aimed to examine the associations of both objectively assessed and perceived physical and social neighborhood characteristics with happiness in European adults. In addition, we aimed to study how these associations differed among subgroups. METHODS Participants (N = 6037) of the cross-sectional SPOTLIGHT survey reported on their level of happiness using a 5-point Likert scale, a...

AND OVER TIME IN THE UNITED STATES: Editor’s Note: One of the contemporary foundations of quality-of-life and social indicators research is studies of subjective well-being in general and happiness in particular. In this issue, I review two recent contributions to this subject. The first is a recent article by Yang Yang in the American Sociological Review. This article sets new standards for th...

modern growth theory argues that intellectual spillovers—idea flows among individuals that are not mediated by the market—are a linchpin of economic progress. In Paul Romer’s seminal work, endogenous economic growth requires increasing returns.1 Without nonmarket intellectual spillovers or some form of externality, increasing returns and economic competition cannot coexist. In Romer’s now canon...

The prosperity of a country, commonly measured in terms of its annual per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has different relationships with population levels of body weight and happiness, as well as environmental impacts such as carbon emissions. The aim of this study was to examine these relationships and to try to find a level of GDP, which provides for sustainable economic activity, opti...

There are various methods by which people can express subjective evaluations quantitatively. For example, happiness can be measured on a scale from 1 to 10, and has been suggested as a measure of economic policy. However, there is resistance to these types of measurement from economists, who often regard welfare to be a cardinal, unbounded quantity. It is unclear whether there are differences b...

Happy in the Hood? The Impact of Residential Segregation on Self-Reported Happiness Previous research consistently finds that racially-based residential segregation is associated with poor economic, health, and social outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between residential segregation and self-reported happiness. Using panel data from the National Survey of Famili...

This paper provides an analytical model representing four polar ethical approaches, by linking them to the main ethics suggested by the philosophical, psychological, and socio-economic literature. Moreover, it develops the analytical model in order to obtain rankings of the 4 polar ethical approaches in terms of happiness and, consequently, to provide insights on which ethical approach should b...

Individual happiness is a fundamental societal metric. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators such as gross domestic product. Here, we examine expressions made on the online, global microblog and social networking service Twitter, uncovering and explaining temporal variations in h...

The neuromodulator dopamine has a well established role in reporting appetitive prediction errors that are widely considered in terms of learning. However, across a wide variety of contexts, both phasic and tonic aspects of dopamine are likely to exert more immediate effects that have been less well characterized. Of particular interest is dopamine's influence on economic risk taking and on sub...