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on Economics of Happiness |
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Issue of 2024‒09‒30
two papers chosen by Viviana Di Giovinazzo, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca |
| By: | Wu, Fengyu; Nugent, Jeffrey B. |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the role of civic engagement, an important form of social capital from the supply side, in buffering the adverse effects of challenging life circumstances in three key domains-employment, marriage, and health-on individual subjective well-being, specifically in terms of overall life evaluations. Our findings reveal that the negative association between divorce, separation, or widowhood and overall life evaluations can be mitigated through active associational memberships (of both the Putnam and Olson types), and three forms of civic engagement in broader network structures (i.e., donating money, volunteering, and helping strangers). In situations of poor health, however, only Olson-type memberships, donating money, volunteering, and helping strangers are found to mitigate the negative association with overall life evaluations. Furthermore, the negative association between unemployment and overall life evaluations is alleviated only by Putnam-type memberships. We also explore heterogeneity in the extent of such mitigation across individual characteristics (e.g., gender and age) and country-level factors (e.g., level of development and region). Finally, we find that the most commonly studied measure of social capital, namely, social trust, does not serve as a significant mediator in any of the relationships examined. Our analysis utilizes data from waves 3, 5, 6, and 7 of the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll conducted between 2009 and 2021. |
| Keywords: | Subjective Well-being, Life Satisfaction, Social Capital, Civic Engagement, Challenging Life Conditions |
| JEL: | I31 Z13 A13 J64 J12 I10 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1489 |
| By: | Greyling, Talita; Rossouw, Stephanié |
| Abstract: | The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of an immense global failure to curb the spread of a pathogen and save lives. To indirectly protect people against a deadly virus, a population needs to achieve herd immunity, which is attained either through vaccination or prior infection. However, achieving herd immunity by vaccination is preferable as it limits the health risks of disease. As the coronavirus mutated, vaccination estimates for achieving herd immunity went from 70% to 90%. In this study, we investigate the order of the importance of the variables to identify those factors that contribute most to achieving high vaccination rates. Secondly, we consider if subjective measures, including the level of happiness and different collective emotions of populations, contribute to higher vaccine uptake. We employ an XGBoost machine learning model (and, as robustness tests, Random Forest and Decision Tree models) to train our data. Our target output variable is the number of people vaccinated as a percentage of the population. We consider two thresholds of our output variable, the first at 70% of a country's population, corresponding to the initial suggestions to achieve herd immunity, and the second with a threshold of 90%, suggested later due to the highly infectious virus. We use a dataset that includes ten countries in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere and variables related to COVID-19, vaccines, country characteristics and the level of happiness and collective emotions within countries. The most important variables listed in reaching the 70% and 90% thresholds are similar. These include the implemented vaccination policy, international travel controls, the percentage of the population in rural areas, the average temperature, and the happiness levels within countries. It is remarkable how the importance of subjective measures of people's emotions and moods play a role in attaining higher vaccination levels. As the vaccine threshold increases, the importance of subjective well-being variables rises. Therefore, not only the implemented policies and country characteristics but also the happiness levels and emotions play a role in compliance and achieving higher vaccination thresholds. Our results provide actionable policy insights to increase vaccination rates. Additionally, we highlight the importance of subjective measures such as happiness and collective emotions to increase vaccination rates and assist governments to be better prepared for the next global pandemic. |
| Keywords: | COVID-19, vaccine, happiness, emotions, supervised machine learning |
| JEL: | C55 I10 I31 H12 N40 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1482 |