Time Use and the Pursuit of Happiness

Dionissi Aliprantis () and Vikram Maheshri ()
Additional contact information
Dionissi Aliprantis: CERGIC - Center for Economic Research on Governance, Inequality and Conflict - ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon - Université de Lyon
Vikram Maheshri: University of Houston

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We develop a new economic framework to study the relationship between how we spend our time and our well-being. Our key insight is that while we may pursue enjoyable activities, they do not all equally contribute to happiness. Moreover, even if we understand what we enjoy, we may not fully understand what makes us happy; we learn this over time. We incorporate these ideas into the standard model of time allocation and introduce the notion of psychic capital, a mental stock that facilitates happiness and is augmented by constructive uses of time. This allows us to connect basic tools from price theory to recent empirical findings in the study of well-being and centuries old ideas in moral philosophy. We under-invest in salubrious activities because we do not fully understand how we derive happiness. The relative prices of heterogeneous activities determine the extent of this under-investment and the speed of our learning. Our model explains several puzzles in the economics of happiness such as the Easterlin paradox and the lifecycle trajectory of subjective well being. We use data from the American Time Use Survey to present a variety of evidence in support of this claim and to show that work is most responsible for increases in well-being in older ages.

Keywords: Leisure; Happiness; Time Use; Psychic Capital; Learning Leisure; Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05-11
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05618616v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05618616v1/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:wpaper:hal-05618616

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().