 Are optimistic expectations keeping the Chinese happy?Paul Frijters, Amy Liu and Xin Meng () Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2012, vol. 81, issue 1, 159-171 Abstract: In this paper we study the effect of optimistic income expectations on life satisfaction amongst the Chinese population. Using a large scale household survey conducted in 2002 we find that the level of optimism about the future is particularly strong in the countryside and amongst rural-to-urban migrants. The importance of these expectations for life satisfaction is particularly pronounced in the urban areas, though also highly significant for the rural area. If expectations were to reverse from positive to negative, we calculate that this would have doubled the proportion of unhappy people and reduced proportion of very happy people by 48 per cent. We perform several robustness checks to see if the results are driven by variations in precautionary savings or reverse causality. Keywords: Expectations; Happiness; Consumption and savings; China; Political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:81:y:2012:i:1:p:159-171 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2011.09.007 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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