Genes, economics, and happiness

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, James H. Fowler and Bruno Frey

No 475, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Research on happiness has produced valuable insights into the sources of subjective well-being that are of importance to economics. A major finding from this literature is that people exhibit a 'baseline' level of happiness that shows persistent strength over time. Here we explore the extent to which baseline happiness is infl uenced by genetic variation. Using data from Add Health, we employ a twin study design to show that genetic variation explains about 33% of the variation in happiness, and that the infl uence of genes varies by gender (women 26%, men 39%) and tends to rise with age. We also present evidence that variation in a speci c gene predicts happiness. Individuals with a transcriptionally more efficient version of the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) are significantly more likely to report higher levels of life satisfaction - having one or two alleles of the more efficient type raises the average likelihood of being very satisfied with one's life by 8.5% and 17.3%, respectively. Finally, using data from an independent source (the Framingham Heart Study) we show that a linked single nucleotide polymorphism (rs2020933) in the SLC6A4 gene also predicts life satisfaction. These results are the first to identify a specific gene that may be associated with baseline levels of happiness.

Keywords: Happiness; subjective well-being; genetics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-hpe, nep-ltv and nep-neu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/51734/1/iewwp475.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Genes, Economics and Happiness (2012)
Working Paper: Genes, Economics, and Happiness (2010)
Working Paper: Genes, Economics, and Happiness (2010)
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:zur:iewwpx:475

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().