During the years before the surge of democratization in 1987-1993, reported happiness levels showed strong nation-level correlations with measures of democracy such as the Freedom House political rights and civil liberties scores: the correlations were in the .7 to .8 range. This could be interpreted as meaning that: (1) living under democratic institutions makes people happy; or (2) high level...

Recent Advances in the Economics of Individual Subjective Well-Being Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulus to the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective wellbeing is often taken as a proxy measure for individual welfare. In our revi...

This Article explores the optimal level of income redistribution by examining the potential welfare gains from redistributive tax and spending policies. Drawing on recent research on human happiness, this Article argues that while wealthy nations are generally happier than their poorer counterparts, neither national nor individual economic growth appear to have an appreciable impact on the subj...

HAPPINESS IS generally considered an ultimate goal of life; virtually everybody wants to be happy. The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 takes it as a self-evident truth that the "pursuit of happiness" is an "unalienable right," comparable to life and liberty. It follows that economics is-or should be-about individual happiness; in particular, how do economic growth, unemploymen...

In this paper, we examine whether engaging in voluntary work leads to greater well-being, as measured by self-reported health and happiness. Drawing on data from the USA, our estimates suggest that people who volunteer report better health and greater happiness than people who do not, a relationship that is not driven by socio-economic differences between volunteers and non-volunteers. We conce...

This paper provides a primer on happiness economics. The survey intends to indicate the general flavor of this new approach to economics. Moreover, it presents a selection of possible applications of economic-happiness research. The fundamental idea of relative utility is discussed by illustrating it with a particular case, namely the relationship between income and happiness. Happiness researc...

This study investigated predictors of happiness and life satisfaction in Rwanda. Data from the World Value Survey (2007; 2012) and gathered from 3,030 Rwandese (age ranging 16 to 90 years, mean age = 34.2, SD = 12.7; 50.5% were females) were pooled for the analysis. For the comparison, international World Value Survey data were utilized. A fixed effects multilevel regression model was used to p...

I examine the impact of happiness on economic behavior. I use self-reported happiness data from the DNB Household Survey from the Netherlands and the German SocioEconomic Panel. I consider changes in regional sunshine as an exogenous determinant of happiness. Both long-run and transitory increases in sunshine increase happiness. Instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, I find ...