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on Economics of Happiness |
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Issue of 2024–12–30
nine papers chosen by Viviana Di Giovinazzo, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca |
| By: | Ghislain B. D. Aïhounton (Laboratory of Analysis and Research on Economic and Social Dynamics, University of Parakou, Benin; Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen); Arne Henningsen (Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen) |
| Abstract: | While price premiums incentivise farmers to engage in organic farming, these premiums are frequently insufficient to compensate for lower yields, resulting in no monetary benefits from adopting organic farming. This study goes beyond purely monetary outcomes and investigates how organic farming is related to both monetary and non-monetary outcomes, including farmers’ general life satisfaction or ‘happiness’. We use data collected from organic and conventional cotton growing households in Benin and employ Structural Equation Modelling in order to investigate the pathways through which organic farming is related to happiness. Our findings indicate that organic farming is positively associated with happiness through farmers’ improved (self-reported) health and increased satisfaction with their work as well as through a direct relationship between organic farming and happiness. While a negative association between organic farming and income exists, it only reduces the overall positive relationship between organic farming and happiness to a very limited extent. Thus, our results show that non-monetary outcomes may be important drivers of the adoption of sustainability standards as well as relevant measures of farmers’ welfare when evaluating policies and programmes. |
| Keywords: | organic farming, happiness, life satisfaction, non-monetary measures of wellbeing, income, farm households. |
| JEL: | D60 I31 O13 Q12 Q18 |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:foi:wpaper:2024_01 |
| By: | Michael D. Krämer; Wiebke Bleidorn |
| Abstract: | How does informal care affect caregivers’ well-being? Theories and existing research provide conflicting answers to this question, partly because the temporal processes and conditions under which different aspects of well-being are affected are unknown. Here, we used longitudinal data from Dutch, German, and Australian representative panels (281, 884 observations, 28, 663 caregivers) to examine theoretically derived hypotheses about changes in caregivers’ life satisfaction, affective experiences, depression/anxiety, and loneliness. Overall, results provided evidence for negative well-being effects after the transition into a caregiver role, with more pronounced and longer-lasting well-being losses in women than men. We further found that well-being losses were larger with more time spent on caregiving, in both men and women. These results were robust across moderators of the caregiving context (care tasks, relationship with care recipient, and fulltime employment). Together, the present findings support predictions of stress theory and highlight lingering questions in theoretical frameworks of care-related well-being costs |
| Keywords: | informal care, caregiving, well-being, life satisfaction, affect, mental health |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1214 |
| By: | Björn Becker (Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU), Trier University); Laszlo Goerke (Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU), Trier University); Yue Huang (Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU), Trier University) |
| Abstract: | The effects of trade union membership on wages and job satisfaction have been studied extensively. Arguably, life satisfaction serves as a more comprehensive measure of the benefits of union membership and warrants closer examination. Using all relevant waves from the German Socio-Economic Panel between 1985 and 2019, we find a negative correlation between trade union membership and life satisfaction in OLS and FE specifications. The association may arise because union members are more concerned about their job and the economic situation and less satisfied with their work. Social capital and wages also perform as channels between membership and life satisfaction. The negative correlation is more pronounced in settings in which trade unions are relatively weak. |
| Keywords: | german socio-economic panel, industrial relations in germany, life satisfaction, trade union membership |
| JEL: | I31 J28 J51 |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iaa:dpaper:202408 |
| By: | Bernard M.S. van Praag (University of Amsterdam); J. Peter Hop (Independent); William H. Greene (University of South Florida) |
| Abstract: | In the last few decades, the study of ordinal data in which the variable of interest is not exactly observed but only known to be in a specific ordinal category has become important. In Psychometrics such variables are analysed under the heading of item response models (IRM). In Econometrics, subjective well-being (SWB) and self-assessed health (SAH) studies, and in Marketing Research, Ordered Probit, Ordered Logit, and Interval Regression models are common research platforms. To emphasize that the problem is not specific to a specific discipline we will use the neutral term coarsened observation. For single-equation models estimation of the latent linear model by Maximum Likelihood (ML) is routine. But, for higher -dimensional multivariate models it is computationally cumbersome as estimation requires the evaluation of multivariate normal distribution functions on a large scale. Our proposed alternative estimation method, based on the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), circumvents this multivariate integration problem. The method is based on the assumed zero correlations between explanatory variables and generalized residuals. This is more general than ML but coincides with ML if the error distribution is multivariate normal. It can be implemented by repeated application of standard techniques. GMM provides a simpler and faster approach than the usual ML approach. It is applicable to multiple equation models with K-dimensional error correlation matrices and kJ response categories for the the kth equation. It also yields a simple method to estimate polyserial and polychoric correlations. Comparison of our method with the outcomes of the Stata ML procedure cmp yields estimates that are not statistically different, while estimation by our method requires only a fraction of the computing time. |
| Keywords: | ordered qualitative data, item response models, multivariate ordered probit, ordinal data analysis, generalized method of moments, polychoric correlations, coarsened events |
| JEL: | C13 C15 C24 C25 C26 C33 C34 C35 |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usf:wpaper:2024-06 |
| By: | Su'a Thomsen; Hamed Shafiee; Amy Russell (The Treasury) |
| Abstract: | New Zealand is home to the world’s largest Pacific population. About one in 12 New Zealanders identifies as having a Pacific ethnicity or ethnicities, and the Pacific population is much younger and faster growing than the general population. As the Pacific population continues to grow, so too does their influence and importance to wellbeing in New Zealand. This analytical paper explores the key values, beliefs and practices that shape Pacific New Zealanders’ experience of wellbeing and provides information about how Pacific people in New Zealand are faring across a range of wellbeing domains. |
| Date: | 2023–04–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nzt:nztaps:ap23/01 |
| By: | Margolis, Louis; Perona, Mathieu |
| Abstract: | En partenariat avec la Chaire TDTE, nous examinons pour la seconde fois le bien-être des adhérents de l’UMR autour de l’âge de la retraite. Contrairement à ce que nous observons pour la moyenne des Français passant à la retraire, le niveau de bien-être subjectif chez ces adhérents est plus élevé chez les jeunes retraités que chez les actifs seniors. Cette différence est particulièrement marquée entre enseignants en fin de carrière et jeunes retraités de l’enseignement. Si les circonstances matérielles du départ à la retraite des professeurs jouent un rôle, l’ampleur des résultats suggère que les enseignants en fin de carrière n’échappent pas au mal-être professionnel documenté chez leurs collègues plus jeunes – leur niveau élevé de défiance envers leur ministère de tutelle venant corroborer cette explication. Le recul de l’âge de départ à la retraite, qui concerne une partie de la classe d’âge, vient également peser sur le bien-être des actifs seniors, y compris hors de l’enseignement. Pour autant, le passage à la retraite mérite d’être accompagné, en particulier pour favoriser la participation à des activités socialisées – associatives, sportives, bénévoles – dont cette vague vient confirmer la contribution au bien-être des retraités. |
| Keywords: | France, Well-Being, Retirement, Bien-être, Retraite, Enseignement |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpm:notobe:2415 |
| By: | Margaret Galt (The Treasury) |
| Abstract: | Human capability is one of the four aspects of wealth in the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework. Combined with the other three aspects – the natural environment, physical and financial capital, and social cohesion, it underpins both current and future wellbeing. Human capability is defined as “people’s knowledge, physical and mental health, including cultural capability”. It would be ideal if we could measure the total contribution to wellbeing of all of these aspects but, at the moment, there is no generally accepted methodology to do this, so it is not covered in this note. Instead, the methodology used widely in the literature measures only the labour market value of the knowledge portion, by looking at lifetime earnings associated with different levels of education. We have called this component “human capital” in this note. Human capital is an important resource for the economy, enabling businesses to operate in a way that provides higher incomes. But it is equally important for an individual as not only do high levels of knowledge and skill increase their incomes, but they are also associated with many other positive outcomes in life. Treasury has previously written on the impact of human capability in lifting living standards in its Start of a Conversation series and this note is a continuation of this work (Morrissey, 2018). The Treasury, as part of the first wellbeing report Te Tai Waiora Wellbeing Report 2022, commissioned Trinh Le, a leading New Zealand expert in this area, to update the valuation of New Zealand’s human capital previously published with co-authors John Gibson and Les Oxley in 2006 (Le et al, 2006). This short note is an introduction to the methodology, and it highlights some aspects of these numbers that were interesting. This work also provides, for the first time, disaggregated numbers for Māori and non-Māori human capital. An accompanying spreadsheet is provided with the detailed tables. |
| Date: | 2023–03–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nzt:nztaps:ap23/02 |
| By: | María Solana Cucher (Universidad de San Andrés); María Victoria Rosino (Universidad de San Andrés); María Florencia Ruiz (Universidad de San Andrés); Mariano Tommasi (Universidad de San Andrés) |
| Abstract: | Family structure and characteristics are considered an important factor in the reproduction of social inequalities. It has been documented that family structure and its stability correlate with various measures of well-being for children and adults, especially women, involved. In this paper, we use a retrospective survey for the City of Buenos Aires involving three different cohorts of women, to explore their conjugal and fertility trajectories. We describe those trajectories with a vector of variables that expand the notion of “fragile families” and use cluster analysis to characterize these trajectories. We find that our indicator of fragility correlates well with variables capturing social vulnerability both in the families of origin as well as in the women's own trajectories. Other findings include (i) an increase in "modern" lifestyles across cohorts, as captured by our indicators; (ii) a rise in educational attainment, with non-university tertiary education increasing before university education, indicating a transitional effect; and (iii) several indications of intergenerational transmission of family patterns and values – for instance, paternal absence is associated with higher teen fertility, and more "modern" lifestyles tend to be adopted by women whose mothers were the main breadwinners at home. A worrisome finding is that, according to our clustering, the number of women with high fragility has increased substantially. |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sad:wpaper:171 |
| By: | Olga Alonso-Villar; Coral del Río |
| Abstract: | We offer a reflection on the measurement of segregation, gathering methodological contributions from sociology and economics, and we use some of them to explore occupational segregation by gender and nativity in Spain. Our goal is to offer a guide to the tools that can be used in empirical analysis, connecting them with theoretical discussions. Our empirical analysis shows that the occupational segregation of immigrant women is a more intense phenomenon than that of native women or immigrant men, although it decreased significantly over the period 2006-2024. Unlike their male peers, occupational sorting strongly penalizes immigrant women after controlling for characteristics. |
| Keywords: | Segregation, gender, migration status, wage gaps, intersectionality |
| JEL: | D63 J15 J16 J31 |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vig:wpaper:2402 |