Death, Happiness, and the Calculation of Compensatory Damages This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be used in tort cases to calculate comp...

Empirical studies on the relationship between income and happiness commonly use standard ordered response models, the most well-known representatives being the ordered logit and the ordered probit. However, these models restrict the marginal probability effects by design, and therefore limit the analysis of distributional aspects of a change in income, that is, the study of whether the income e...

The Happiness Gains from Sorting and Matching in the Labor Market Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on reported satisfaction with life it is possible to assess these latter ga...

This paper estimates the demand for nature based tourist visits to Zambia and the willingness of international tourists to pay to visit Zambia using a single site individual travel cost model. The model estimated is corrected for both truncation of the dependent variable and endogenous stratification that arises due to on-site sampling. We find a negative binomial specification provides stable ...

A Family Affair: Job Loss and the Mental Health of Spouses and Adolescents This study examines the impact of involuntary job loss on the mental health of family members. Estimates from fixed-effects panel data models, using panel data for Australia, provide little evidence of any negative spillover effect on the mental health of husbands as a result of their wives’ job loss. The mental well-bei...

Living Conditions of Children and Parental Well-Being – Evidence from German Data on Life Satisfaction The question that this paper addresses is whether or not parents are altruistic towards their children. A new approach will be introduced, where the life satisfaction data of parents will be regressed onto the living conditions of their children who now live independently. After controlling fo...

Understanding Poverty among the Elderly in India: Implications for Social Pension Policy The Government of India is implementing a new policy which dramatically increases funding for a cash transfer program targeted to the poor elderly. The expansion of this ‘social pension’ in terms of coverage and benefit levels is taking place with little understanding of poverty among India’s elderly or its...

A Cross-State Comparison of Measures of Subjective Well-Being* Using data drawn from the 2010 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Module, this study examines the relationship between three measures of subjective well-being based on timeuse data and an objective measure of well-being. Whereas the measures of affect – net affect and the U-index – are uncorrelated with the objective quality-of-lif...

In this paper we examine whether the “tunnel effect” was an intrinsic feature of two different periods of transition in Russia: recession (1994-1998) and growth (2000-2004). Making use of the panel data nature of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, linear an non-linear estimation strategies are applied for modeling the individual well-being measured by selfreported levels of satisfactio...

This paper studies whether pro-environmental consumption choices are consistent with utility maximization and what role the consumption behavior of reference persons and one’s own past behavior play in this context. By combining data on individuals’ pro-environmental consumption from a unique data set with data on subjective well-being, we find that people could attain higher well-being (utilit...