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A Note on Unhappiness and Unemployment Duration

Work, Jobs and Well-being across the Millennium

This paper uses repeated cross-section data ISSP data from 1989, 1997 and 2005 to consider movements in job quality. It is first underlined that not having a job when you want one is a major source of low well-being. Second, job values have remained fairly stable over time, although workers seem to give increasing importance to the more “social” aspects of jobs: useful and helpful jobs. The central ...

The Organisational Commitment of Workers in OECD Countries

The degree to which workers identify with their firms, and how hard they are willing to work for them, would seem to be key variables for the understanding of both firm productivity and individual labour-market outcomes. This paper uses repeated crosssection ISSP data from 1997 and 2005 to consider three of measures of worker commitment. There are enormous cross-country differences in these commitment ...

Happiness, Habits and High Rank: Comparisons in Economic and Social Life

The role of money in producing sustained subjective well-being seems to be seriously compromised by social comparisons and habituation. But does that necessarily mean that we would be better off doing something else instead? This paper suggests that the phenomena of comparison and habituation are actually found in a considerable variety of economic and social activities, rendering conclusions regarding ...

Attitudes to Income Inequality: Experimental and Survey Evidence

We review the survey and experimental findings in the literature on attitudes to income inequality. We interpret the latter as any disparity in incomes between individuals. We classify these findings into two broad types of individual attitudes toward the income distribution in a society: the normative and the comparative view. The first can be thought of as the individual's disinterested evaluation ...

Poverty Profiles and Well-Being: Panel Evidence from Germany

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on the role of time. We use panel data on 49,000 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2012 to uncover three empirical relationships. First, life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of contemporaneous poverty. Second, poverty scars: those who have been poor in the past report lower life ...

Adaption to Poverty in Long-Run Panel Data

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 45,800 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2011 to show first that life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of contemporaneous poverty. We then reveal that there is little evidence of adaptation within a poverty spell: poverty ...

Poverty Comparisons

There has been considerable interest in contextual effects on well-being. The size of the relationship between own individual ill-health and unemployment, for example, has been shown to depend on the extent of ill-health and unemployment in the local area. We here use almost 30 years of German panel data to ask whether such contextual effects also apply to income poverty. We do so by looking at the ...

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

Happy House: Spousal Weight and Individual Well-Being

We use life satisfaction and Body Mass Index (BMI) information from three waves of the SOEP to test for social interactions in BMI between spouses. Social interactions require that the cross-partial effect of partner’s weight and own weight in the utility function be positive. Using life satisfaction as a utility proxy, semi-parametric regressions show that the correlation between satisfaction and ...