Editorial This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd) License. Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.-Aristotle If the government cannot create happiness for its people , then there is no purpose for government to exist.-Legal code of Bhutan (1729) Gro...

Although the corrosive effect of mental ill health on human health and happiness has long been recognised, it is only relatively recently that mental illness has been acknowledged as one of the major threats to economic productivity worldwide. This is because the major mental disorders most commonly have their onset during adolescence and early adulthood, and therefore have a disproportionate i...

Does it make us unhappier when we compare our consumption with that of the Joneses or our own past achievements? This paper tries an answer by bringing together two disparate literatures: the macro (growth) theory on habit formation and the applied literature related to the Easterlin paradox. Using the association of happiness and family income in the U.S. it calibrates a simple model of econom...

Empirical studies on the relationship between income and happiness commonly use standard ordered response models, the most well-known representatives being the ordered logit and the ordered probit. However, these models restrict the marginal probability effects by design, and therefore limit the analysis of distributional aspects of a change in income, that is, the study of whether the income e...

In economics there is presently an almost revolutionary development. The direct measurement of subjective welfare challenges traditional economics, inspires B.S. Frey ( ) Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK e-mail: [email protected] B.S. Frey Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts, Basel, Switzerland L. Steiner University of Zürich, Zürich, Switze...

In recent years, economists have being using socio-economic and socio-demographic characteristics to explain self-reported individual happiness or satisfaction with life. Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), we employ data disaggregated at the individual and local level to show that while these variables are important, consideration of amenities such as climate, environmental and urban...

The field of “Happiness Research” has grown markedly. A central question is whether higher income and/or economic growth rates are associated with higher levels of Subjective Well Being (SWB). Cross-sectional analysis clearly indicates that there is a positive relationship between income and SWB. However, in time series this relationship may vanish (the Easterlin Paradox). In this paper, we exa...