The impact of inflation and unemployment on subjective personal and country evaluations

Néstor Gándelman and Ruben Hernandez-Murillo ()

Review, 2009, issue May, pages 107-126

Abstract: The authors use data from the Gallup World Poll to analyze what determines individual assessments of past, present, and future personal and country well-being. These measures allow the analysis of two dimensions of happiness data not previously examined in the literature: the better-than-average effect and optimism. The authors find that individuals tend to evaluate their personal well-being as being better than their country's and tend to expect that their future well-being will improve. The authors also analyze the impact of inflation and unemployment on these subjective measures and find that both variables have a negative effect on individuals' assessments of past and present well-being for themselves and their country; in contrast with other studies, however, they do not find that the effect of unemployment is significantly different from that of inflation.

Keywords: Inflation (Finance); Unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/09/05/Gandelman.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedlrv:y:2009:i:may:p:107-126:n:v.91no.3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.stls.frb. ... h/order/pubform.html

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diane Rosenberger ().