It's not the economy, stupid! How social capital and GDP relate to happiness over time

Stefano Bartolini and Francesco Sarracino

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: What predicts the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We correlate the trends of subjective well-being with the trends of social capital and/or GDP. We find that in the long and medium run social capital largely predicts the trends of subjective wellbeing in our sample of countries. In the short-term this relationship weakens. Indeed, in the short run, changes in social capital predict a much smaller portion of the changes in subjective well-being than over longer periods. GDP follows a reverse path, thus confirming the Easterlin paradox: in the short run GDP is more positively correlated to well-being than in the medium-term, while in the long run this correlation vanishes.

Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-hpe and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:1411.2138

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