For many people there is tradeo¤ between choosing a job that they will enjoy and one at which they are good and will earn a high income. We embed this observation in a matching model. Consider then men and women who are a priori identical in the sense that both are equally likely to be good at one of two jobs and their satisfaction from each job is drawn from the same distribution. They are ran...

We test empirically whether people’s life satisfaction depends on their relative income position in the neighbourhood, drawing on a unique dataset, the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics. Relative deprivation theory suggests that individuals are happier the better their relative income position in the neighbourhood is. ...

Making use of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey coupled with air pollution data generated by The Air Pollution Model (TAPM), this paper employs the life satisfaction approach to estimate the cost of air pollution from human activities in South East Queensland. This paper offers at least three improvements over much of the existing literature: (1) wi...

BACKGROUND The beneficial effects of higher education on healthy aging are generally accepted, but the mechanisms are less well understood. Education may influence healthy aging through improved employment opportunities that enhance feelings of personal control and reduce hazardous exposures, or through higher incomes that enable individuals to access better health care or to reside in better n...

Traditional tools of welfare economics identify the envy-related welfare loss from conspicuous consumption only under very strong assumptions. Measured income and life satisfaction offers an alternative for estimating such consumption externalities. The approach is developed in the context of luxury car consumption (Ferraris and Porsches) in Switzerland. Results from household panel data and fi...

This paper is the first to link economic theory with empirical life-satisfaction analyses referring to internal migration. We derive an extension of the Roback (1982) model to account for benefits from regional amenities in the utility function, while controlling for income, housing costs, and migration costs. Using highly disaggregated spatial panel information on people’s migration decisions ...

In this paper, the equivalence scale elasticity will be estimated by using individual panel data on income satisfaction from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP). Satisfaction or happiness data have been more frequently used by economists in recent years to analyze individual well-being. The approach differs from other subjective approaches as respondents are requested to evaluate curr...