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Hypertension and happiness across nations
- Journal of Health Economics
, 2007
"... A modern statistical literature argues that countries such as Denmark are particularly happy while nations like East Germany are not. Are such claims credible? The paper explores this by building on two ideas. The first is that psychological well-being and high blood-pressure are thought by clinicia ..."
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Cited by 57 (13 self)
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A modern statistical literature argues that countries such as Denmark are particularly happy while nations like East Germany are not. Are such claims credible? The paper explores this by building on two ideas. The first is that psychological well-being and high blood-pressure are thought by clinicians to be inversely correlated. The second is that blood-pressure problems can be reported more objectively than mental well-being. Using data on 16 countries, the paper finds that happier nations report lower levels of hypertension. The paper’s results are consistent with, and seem to offer a step towards the validation of, cross-national estimates of well-being.
Forthcoming. “Dissatisfied with Life, but Having a good Day: Time-Use and Well-Being of the Unemployed” Economic Journal
"... An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the RePEc website: www.RePEc.org • from the CESifo website: Twww.CESifo-group.org/wpT CESifo Working Paper No. 2604 Dissatisfied with Life, but Having a Good Day: Time-Use and Well-Being of the Unemploy ..."
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Cited by 29 (0 self)
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An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the RePEc website: www.RePEc.org • from the CESifo website: Twww.CESifo-group.org/wpT CESifo Working Paper No. 2604 Dissatisfied with Life, but Having a Good Day: Time-Use and Well-Being of the Unemployed We apply the Day Reconstruction Method to compare unemployed and employed people with respect to their subjective assessment of emotional affects, differences in the composition and duration of activities during the course of a day, and their self-reported life satisfaction. Employed persons are more satisfied with their life than the unemployed and report more positive feelings when engaged in similar activities. Weighting these activities with their duration shows, however, that average experienced utility does not differ between the two groups. Although the unemployed feel sadder when engaged in similar activities, they can
and Well-being Across the Millennium
- In
"... This paper uses repeated cross-section data ISSP data from 1989, 1997 and 2005 to consider movements in job quality. It is first underlined that not having a job when you want one is a major source of low well-being. Second, job values have remained fairly stable over time, although workers seem to ..."
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Cited by 19 (5 self)
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This paper uses repeated cross-section data ISSP data from 1989, 1997 and 2005 to consider movements in job quality. It is first underlined that not having a job when you want one is a major source of low well-being. Second, job values have remained fairly stable over time, although workers seem to give increasing importance to the more “social ” aspects of jobs: useful and helpful jobs. The central finding of the paper is that, following a substantial fall between 1989 and 1997, subjective measures of job quality have mostly bounced back
Perspectives from the Happiness Literature and the Role of New Instruments for Policy Analysis
- IZA Discussion Paper
, 2007
"... An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the RePEc website: www.RePEc.org • from the CESifo website: Twww.CESifo-group.deT CESifo Working Paper No. 1912 ..."
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Cited by 11 (0 self)
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An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the RePEc website: www.RePEc.org • from the CESifo website: Twww.CESifo-group.deT CESifo Working Paper No. 1912
Do Danes and Italians Rate Life Satisfaction in the Same Way? Using Vignettes to Correct for Individual-Specific Scale Biases ∗
, 2008
"... Self-reported life satisfaction is highly heterogeneous across similar countries. We show that this phenomenon can by largely explained by the fact that individuals adopt different scales and benchmarks in evaluating themselves. Using a cross sectional dataset on individuals aged 50 and over in ten ..."
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Cited by 9 (1 self)
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Self-reported life satisfaction is highly heterogeneous across similar countries. We show that this phenomenon can by largely explained by the fact that individuals adopt different scales and benchmarks in evaluating themselves. Using a cross sectional dataset on individuals aged 50 and over in ten European countries, we compare estimates from an Ordered Probit in which life satisfaction scales are invariant across respondents with those from a Hopit model in which vignettes are used to correct for individual-specific scale biases. We find that variations in response scales explain a large part of the differences found in raw data. Moreover, the cross countries ranking in life satisfaction dramatically depends on scale biases.
Changing Identity: Retiring from Unemployment
, 2011
"... Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their ..."
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Cited by 6 (0 self)
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Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction when they retire. These results are robust to controlling for changes in other life circumstances and suggest that retiring is associated with a switch in the relevant social norms that causes an increase in identity utility for the formerly unemployed. This is supportive of the idea that, by including identity in the utility function, results from the empirical life satisfaction literature can be reconciled with the economic theory of individual utility.
Happiness, habits and high rank: Comparisons in economic and social life
, 2005
"... Money doesn’t seem to make us happy for reasons of social comparison and habituation. But does that necessarily mean that we would be better off doing something else instead? This paper suggests that the phenomena of comparison and habituation are actually found in a variety of economic and social a ..."
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Cited by 6 (2 self)
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Money doesn’t seem to make us happy for reasons of social comparison and habituation. But does that necessarily mean that we would be better off doing something else instead? This paper suggests that the phenomena of comparison and habituation are actually found in a variety of economic and social activities, rendering policy conclusions more difficult.
Heritability and Genome-Wide Linkage Scan of Subjective Happiness
"... Causes of individual differences in happiness, as assessed with the Subjective Happiness Scale, are investigated in a large of sample twins and siblings from the Netherlands Twin Register. Over 12,000 twins and siblings, average age 24.7 years (range 12 to 88), took part in the study. A genetic mode ..."
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Cited by 5 (0 self)
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Causes of individual differences in happiness, as assessed with the Subjective Happiness Scale, are investigated in a large of sample twins and siblings from the Netherlands Twin Register. Over 12,000 twins and siblings, average age 24.7 years (range 12 to 88), took part in the study. A genetic model with an age by sex design was fitted to the data with structural equation modeling in Mx. The heritability of happiness was estimated at 22 % for males and 41% in females. No effect of age was observed. To identify the genomic regions contributing to this heritability, a genome-wide linkage study for happiness was conducted in sibling pairs. A subsample of 1157 offspring from 441 families was genotyped with an average of 371 micro-satellite markers per individual. Phenotype and genotype data were analyzed in MERLIN with multipoint variance component linkage analysis and age and sex as covariates. A linkage signal (logarithm of odds score 2.73, empirical p value 0.095) was obtained at the end of the long arm of chromosome 19 for marker D19S254 at 110 cM. A second suggestive linkage peak was found at the short arm of chromosome 1 (LOD of 2.37) at 153 cM, marker D1S534 (empirical p value of.209). These two regions of interest are not overlapping with the regions found for contrasting phenotypes (such as depression, which is negatively associated with happiness). Further linkage and future association studies are warranted.
Hypertension and Happiness across Regions
, 2009
"... Acknowledgements: The second author’s work was funded by an ESRC professorial research Human well-being is important but hard to measure. Using data on approximately 100,000 individuals, this paper extends in two ways the Blanchflower and Oswald (2008) approach that proposes blood pressure as a biom ..."
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Cited by 4 (0 self)
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Acknowledgements: The second author’s work was funded by an ESRC professorial research Human well-being is important but hard to measure. Using data on approximately 100,000 individuals, this paper extends in two ways the Blanchflower and Oswald (2008) approach that proposes blood pressure as a biomarker of national happiness. First, we use objective rather than subjective measures of hypertension. Our analysis draws upon nurse-collected systolic and diastolic readings. Second, we document an apparently strong relationship – other factors held constant – between the measured blood pressure in an area and the level of GHQ mental strain in that area. We conclude, cautiously, that blood pressure may be a defensible biomarker for psychological wellbeing. Hypertension and Happiness across Regions
of LaborEmotional Prosperity and the Stiglitz Commission
"... Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international resear ..."
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Cited by 4 (1 self)
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Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. IZA Discussion Paper No. 5390
