How to assess happiness? A tale of three measures

Vani Borooah

Applied Economics Letters, 2005, vol. 12, issue 3, 191-194

Abstract: A growing literature in economics points to the importance of targeting policy towards making people happy rather than towards making them well-off. Empirical work in this area relies, however, on a simple direct question to survey respondents on how happy they feel. This study shows, using three different measures of happiness/unhappiness, that while there was a commonality in the factors making for happiness (or unhappiness), the quantitative strength of the factors, in terms of their effects on the various outcomes, differed according to the definition used. Moreover, some factors influenced particular measures of happiness but did not influence others.

Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article& ... 40C6AD35DC6213A474B5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:12:y:2005:i:3:p:191-194

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/1350485042000323686

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().