EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Sad Truth About Happiness Scales: Empirical Results

Timothy Bond and Kevin Lang

No 24853, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We replicate nine key results from the happiness literature: the Easterlin Paradox, the ‘U-shaped’ relation between happiness and age, the happiness trade-off between inflation and unemployment, cross-country comparisons of happiness, the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program on happiness, the impact of marriage and children on happiness, the ‘paradox’ of declining female happiness, and the effect of disability on happiness. We show that none of the findings can be obtained relying only on nonparametric identification. The findings in the literature are highly dependent on one's beliefs about the underlying distribution of happiness in society, or the social welfare function one chooses to adopt. Furthermore, any conclusions reached from these parametric approaches rely on the assumption that all individuals report their happiness in the same way. When the data permit, we test for equal reporting functions, conditional on the existence of a common cardinalization from the normal family. We reject this assumption in all cases in which we test it.

JEL-codes: D63 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-hpe
Note: LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24853.pdf (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:nbr:nberwo:24853

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24853

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24853