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on Economics of Happiness |
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Issue of 2019‒01‒21
seven papers chosen by |
| By: | Kristyna Troneckova (Masaryk Univerisity, Czech Republic) |
| Abstract: | The aim of the research is to compare the well-being and social life of people over sixty years of age depending on the degree of national spirituality. The goal is to capture and describe the quality of life and spirituality among the Bhutanese, Norwegian and Chinese populations in comparison with Czech participants, mainly by semi-structured interviews and the use of interpretative phenomenological analysis serving as a tool for evaluating given interviews. For research work, it is crucial to contribute to the understanding of phenomena that can lead to greater seniors' satisfaction, which is important because the amount of these people is still increasing. The current results have shown a big difference between the religion in Norway and Bhutan, the country of happiness. There was found a strong belief in Tibetan Buddhism among Bhutanese participants so far. None of the participants considered himself an atheist or a person with non-religious spirituality. All respondents showed a high level of satisfaction with life, and they often experienced joy. They come from well functional families and are happy with themselves. Norwegian participants are mostly agnostic or non-religious spiritual persons. None of them has proved to be a practicing believer nor a strict atheist. They felt the sense of life primarily in sport and in nature, they often mention cross-country skiing as a way of getting closer to the spirit. Furthermore, the intention is to extend the research on other nations. |
| Keywords: | well-being, spirituality, belief, Christianity, Buddhism, quality of life |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:smo:jpaper:021kt&r=all |
| By: | Kaiser, Caspar F. (Nuffield College, Oxford); Vendrik, Maarten C.M. (Maastricht University) |
| Abstract: | Richer people are happier than poorer people, but when a country becomes richer over time, its people do not become happier. This seemingly contradictory pair of findings of Richard Easterlin has be-come famous as the Easterlin Paradox. However, it was met with counterevidence. To shed more light on this controversy, we distinguish between five different versions of the paradox. These versions apply to either groups of countries or individual countries, and to either the long or the medium term. We argue that the long term is most appropriate for testing the paradox, and that tests of the paradox should always control for an autonomous time trend. Unfortunately, this requirement renders the long-term version of the paradox for individual countries untestable. We test all other versions of the paradox with Eurobarometer data from 27 European countries. We do so by estimating country-panel equations for mean life satisfaction that include trend and cyclical components of per capita GDP as regressors. When testing variants of the paradox that apply to groups of countries, we find a clear and robust confirmation of the long- and medium-term versions of the paradox for a group of nine Western and Northern European countries. Moreover, we obtain a non-robust rejection of the medium-term variant of the paradox for a set of eleven Eastern European countries. On the level of individual countries, the medium-term variant of the paradox clearly holds for the nine Western and Northern European countries, but is consistently rejected for Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. In the case of the Eastern European countries, the medium-term version of the paradox is rejected for Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Poland. As the Western and Northern European countries have a high per capita GDP as compared to that of Southern and Eastern European countries, our results are in line with the finding of Proto and Rustichini (2013), who find a non-monotonic relation between per capita GDP and life satisfaction over time which is positive for poorer countries, but flat (or negative) for richer countries. |
| Keywords: | Hodrick-Prescott filter, economic growth, life satisfaction, happiness, Easterlin Paradox, European country panel |
| JEL: | I31 I32 O11 |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11994&r=all |
| By: | Song, Younghwan (Union College); Gao, Jia (Union College) |
| Abstract: | Using data from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Modules, this paper examines how subjective well-being (SWB) varies between working at home and working in the workplace among wage/salary workers. Both OLS and individual fixed-effects models are employed for estimation, and the results are largely consistent. In general, we find that working at home is associated with a lower level of net affect and a higher probability of having unpleasant feelings relative to working in the workplace. We further decompose homeworking into telework and bringing work home and find that the effect of SWB varies by types of homeworking. In comparison with working in the workplace, telework increases stress in both samples of weekdays and weekends/holidays, and it also reduces net affect and increases unpleasantness in the sample of weekends/holidays. In contrast, bringing work home on weekdays results in a lower level of net affect due to less happiness received. The only positive effect of homeworking we discover is that telework reduces tiredness on weekdays. As to the existence of gender difference in the effect of homeworking, our OLS results show that working at home is associated with positive affections for males but negative affections for females. However, fixed-effects models suggest that both males and females feel more stressed when teleworking, indicating the existence of individual heterogeneity. |
| Keywords: | working at home, telework, subjective well-being, time use |
| JEL: | J22 J28 D13 |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11993&r=all |
| By: | Feng, Xiaodong; Jayakar, Krishna; Zhang, Huiping; Tang, Zhiwei |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption and usage in enhancing the subjective well-being (SWB) of citizens, using the latest available China General Social Survey (CGSS) database. The impact is assessed using a two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) accounting for both individual- and city-level characteristics. The findings suggest that government policies to increase the adoption of broadband and ICTs have implications beyond economic growth and opportunity, extending to the "happiness" of citizens. |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:itsb18:190381&r=all |
| By: | Ahmed Rashad (Economic Studies and Policies Sector, Government of Dubai); Mesbah Sharaf |
| Abstract: | The work environment has witnessed dramatic changes over the past three decades as a result of globalization, competition, and economic uncertainty, which led to a sharp rise in precarious employment across the world. Although the number of precarious jobs has increased considerably in the Arab countries over the recent decades, little is known about such jobs’ social and health consequences. Using Egypt as a case study, this paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by adding new evidence on the social consequences of precarious employment from an understudied region. This paper particularly looks at the impact of precarious employment on mental health, self-rated health and happiness in marriage. We use longitudinal data from the Survey of Yong People in Egypt (SYPE) conducted in 2009 and 2014. To estimate the causal impact of precarious employment, we employ several identification strategies, namely fixed and random effect regressions and instrumental variable two stage least squares. Our findings suggest that precarious employment is associated with poor mental health and worse well-being among youth. Our main findings remained across different identification strategies with different assumptions. The adverse impact of precarious work is likely to be mediated, though in some models it is a partial mediation, through poor working conditions such as low salary, maltreatment at work, job insecurity, and harassment from colleagues. |
| Date: | 2018–05–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:erg:wpaper:1200&r=all |
| By: | Elham Amirnovin (Payame Noor University of Tabriz, Iran); Azizeh Ghaffarian (Azad University of Tabriz, Iran) |
| Abstract: | This research examines the marital satisfaction and happiness in men and women who are married at early age and who are married at late age. The research method is survey and the sample size is 240 married persons. In women, marriage under the age of 20 was considered early marriage and marriage of over 30 was late marriage. Also in men, marriage under the age of 25 was considered early marriage and marriage over 30 was late marriage. The instruments was Enrich marital satisfaction and Oxford happiness questionnaires. The results show that there is significant different between gender and marital satisfaction and happiness and also there is significant different between marital age and marital satisfaction and happiness. Also results show that women who are married at early age are less satisfied with marital satisfaction and women who are married at old age are more satisfied with marital satisfaction. On the other side, men who are married at early age are more satisfied with marital satisfaction and men who are married at old age are less satisfied with marital satisfaction. |
| Keywords: | age of marriage, gender, happiness, marital satisfaction |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:smo:jpaper:034ea&r=all |
| By: | Nisreen Salti (American University in Beirut); Jad Chaaban; Alexandra Irani; Rima Al Mokdad |
| Abstract: | This paper develops a youth well-being index, which allows for the first time to expand the measurement of national well-being to cover non-nationals with a focus on young people. Using micro data from the 2015 socio-economic survey of Palestinian refugees conducted in Lebanon, the newly devised index allows to measure well-being along various dimensions including education, health, housing, employment and access to information. The index results across sub-regions and refugee groups show that a richer and more holistic measurement of youth human development can provide better tools for a more efficient and equitable targeting of scarce assistance funds. |
| Date: | 2018–12–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:erg:wpaper:1268&r=all |