 Ignorance is not bliss: On the role of education in subjective well-beingPavel Yakovlev () and Susane Leguizamon Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2012, vol. 41, issue 6, 806-815 Abstract: This study estimates the impact of education on self-reported happiness across 50 American states using the recently available Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (WBI). A 3SLS model is used to estimate the simultaneous impact of education, income, and health on aggregated subjective well-being (SWB) as measured by state-level WBI. Over 80% of the variation in SWB across states can be explained by differences in education, income, health, age, trust, stress, temperature, religion, and rainfall. Higher education (college degree) has a relatively strong positive effect on SWB, but secondary education (high school) does not. We find no statistically significant educational spillover on SWB across state borders, which suggests that the positive effect of higher education on SWB is mostly due to private non-monetary benefits rather than positive externalities. Keywords: Happiness; Subjective well-being; Education; Schooling; Income; Health; Externality (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:soceco:v:41:y:2012:i:6:p:806-815 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2012.08.009 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier |
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