Happiness as a Driver of Risk-Avoiding Behavior

Robert J. B. Goudie, Sach Mukherjee, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Andrew Oswald and Stephen Wu

No 3451, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Understanding the reasons why individuals take risks, particularly unnecessary risks, remains an important question in economics. We provide the first evidence of a powerful connection between happiness and risk-avoidance. Using data on 300,000 Americans, we demonstrate that happier individuals wear seatbelts more frequently. This result is obtained with five different methodological approaches, including Bayesian model-selection and an instrumented analysis based on unhappiness through widowhood. Independent longitudinal data corroborate the finding, showing that happiness is predictive of future motor vehicle accidents. Our results are consistent with a rational-choice explanation: happy people value life and thus act to preserve it.

Keywords: risk preferences; seatbelt usage; vehicle accidents; subjective well-being; happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C30 D60 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3451.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Happiness as a Driver of Risk-Avoiding Behavior (2012)
Working Paper: Happiness as a driver of risk-avoiding behavior (2012)
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:ces:ceswps:_3451

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().