Subjective well-being (SWB) is composed of people’s evaluations of their lives, including pleasant affect, infrequent unpleasant affect, life satisfaction (LS). We review the research literature concerning the influence of culture on SWB. We argue that some types of well-being, as well as their causes, are consistent across cultures, whereas there are also unique patterns of well-being in socie...

This paper analyses whether the aggregation of individual happiness scores to a National Happiness Index can still be trusted once governments have proclaimed their main objective to be the pursuit—or even maximization— of this National Happiness Index. The answer to this investigation is clear-cut: as soon as the National Happiness Index has become a policy goal, it can no longer be trusted to...

Diminishing marginal well-being from income suggests that redistributing income from the rich to the poor will raise average levels of well-being within a society. This utilitarian logic suggests that— conditional on average income—countries with greater income inequality will experience lower levels of average well-being. Yet existing research has failed to find clear evidence that inequality ...

Retirement and Subjective Well-Being We provide an explanation for the common finding that the effect of retirement on life satisfaction is negligible. For this we use subjective well-being measures for life and domains of life satisfaction that are available in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and show that the effect of voluntary retirement on satisfaction with current household income...