Day-of-the-Week Effects in Subjective Well-Being: Does Selectivity Matter?
Semih Tumen and
Tugba Zeydanli ()
Working Papers from Research and Monetary Policy Department, Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey
Abstract:
Individuals tend to self-report higher well-being levels on certain days of the week than they do on the remaining days, controlling for observables. Using the 2008 release of the British Household Panel Survey, we test whether this empirical observation suffers from selection bias. In other words, we examine if subjective well-being is correlated with unobserved characteristics that lead the individuals to take the interview on specific days of the week. We focus on two distinct well-being measures : job satisfaction and happiness. We provide convincing evidence for both of these measures that the interviews are not randomly distributed across the days of the week. In other words, individuals with certain unobserved characteristics tend to take the interviews selectively. We conclude that a considerable part of the day-of-the-week patterns can be explained by a standard \non-random sorting on unobservables" argument rather than \mood uctuations". This means that the day-of-the-week estimates reported in the literature are likely to be biased and should be treated cautiously.
Keywords: Day-of-the-week effects; subjective well-being; self-selection; treatment effects; BHPS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 D60 J28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tcmb.gov.tr/wps/wcm/connect/EN/TCMB+EN ... g+Paperss/2013/13-38 (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Day-of-the-Week Effects in Subjective Well-Being: Does Selectivity Matter? (2014) 
Working Paper: Day-of-the-Week Effects in Subjective Well-Being: Does Selectivity Matter? (2013) 
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:tcb:wpaper:1338
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Research and Monetary Policy Department, Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sermet Pekin () and Ilker Cakar () and ().