The structure of subjective well-being and its evolution - An empirical analysis based on individual data

C. Afsa
Additional contact information
C. Afsa: Insee
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Didier BLANCHET

Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques

Abstract: Individual well-being is not driven only by income. For example, unemployment, bad health, or uncomfortable housing conditions are likely to worsen quality of life. Consequently such variables must be taken into account in order to measure individual well-being correctly, on the condition that we are able to estimate their respective weights. Roughly speaking, is individual well-being more impacted by being unemployed or by living in tiny spaces? And by how much? We propose here a method for estimating weights of a synthetic index of well-being. The method uses satisfaction variables along with more objective variables describing individual situations, in order to construct indicators which measure average well-being and its evolution as well as distribution of individual well-being over the population. We use data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP 1994-2001). We specify econometric models suited for overcoming the subjective nature of satisfaction variables.We estimate weights for the components of well-being indexes that we then build using individual data from enquêtes Revenus Fiscaux collected by Insee. We discuss the validity of these first results and suggest directions for future research.

Keywords: well-being; satisfaction variables; panel data models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/bc6p06zr03k/f1.pdf Document de travail de la DESE numéro G2008/12 (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:nse:doctra:g2008-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by INSEE ().