Causes and effects of wellbeing

External publication

World Happiness Report 2025

In this year's issue, we focus on the impact of caring and sharing on people's happiness. Like 'mercy' in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, caring is "twice-blessed" - it blesses those who give and those who receive. In ...Read more...

Chapter

Money and happiness

in Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing

Many people believe that earning more money would bring more happiness into their lives. However, despite massive improvements in material living conditions in most Western countries, average population happiness has sta...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2024

This issue of the World Happiness Report focuses on the happiness of people at different stages of life. In the seven ages of man in Shakespeare's As You Like It, the later stages of life are portrayed as deeply depressi...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Sleeping our way to being productive

Sleep is key to our physical and mental health. It also affects people's employment and productivity. Joan Costa-i-Font, Sarah Fleche and Ricardo Pagan explore how the amount of weekly sleep influences employment, produc...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The three biggest workplace anxieties of 2023

What can leaders do to calm workplace anxieties and get the best out of their teams in 2024? Jazzy Jasiulek, Daniel Jolles, Nikita, and Grace Lordan asked over 1,400 professionals about their top anxieties and share how ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Research for the World:

Using peoples' feelings of happiness to make better policy decisions

How we spend our time directly impacts how satisfied we are with our lives, and understanding the activities that bolster our wellbeing - and those that don't - can help policymakers make better decisions when allocating...Read more...

Blog

What Works Centre for Wellbeing:

Using people's feelings to value time

This short summary introduces the main idea in Christian Krekel and George MacKerron's paper proposing an alternative method to estimate the value of time (VOT): experiential valuation based on experience-sampling....Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Inflation may be coming down but its unequal effects can still have a big impact on wellbeing

Inflation is coming down across developed economies, although not as much as governments and central banks would like. Price hikes hurt everyone, but research into inflation inequality shows the effects are more pronounc...Read more...

Blog

Fire & Wire Podcast:

Fire & wire: wellbeing in the workplace (podcast)

Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve discusses why wellbeing matters in the workplace and shares some of the latest findings coming out of the Wellbeing Research Centre, in the second episode of the Fire & Wire podcast....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Wellbeing: science and policy

What produces a happy society and a happy life? In the first textbook on wellbeing, Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve explain how wellbeing can be measured, what causes it and how it can be improved. They conclude ...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2023

It has been over ten years since the first World Happiness Report was published. And it is exactly ten years since the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 66/281, proclaiming 20 March to be observed annual...Read more...

CentrePiece article

CEP Insights: Wellbeing

The CEP carries out policy-focused research on the causes of economic growth and effective ways to create a fair, inclusive and sustainable society. The Insights series highlights the contributions that CEP research has ...Read more...

Blog

The Conversation:

Four-day week trial confirms working less increases wellbeing and productivity

A group of companies that have been trialling a four-day working week have recently reported increased revenue, with fewer employees taking time off or resigning, thus confirming an increase in wellbeing and productivity...Read more...

Journal article

Psychological Science:

Feeling good is feeling better

Can people remember their past happiness? We analyzed data from four longitudinal surveys from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany spanning from the 1970s until the present, in which more than 60,0...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Is daylight saving time good for us?

Daylight saving time is observed in over seventy countries with the goal of reducing energy use. Studies show that time shifts, by reducing the number of hours we sleep, decrease our life satisfaction. Joan Costa-Font, S...Read more...

Blog

Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy:

Inclusion and wellbeing

The overarching good, according to economists, is utility, by which they mean wellbeing....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Lessons from ten years of the World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report gives us an annual insight into global wellbeing. Maria Cotofan looks at what we have learned about the determinants of wellbeing in the past ten years – and what challenges and opportunities l...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2022

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the World Happiness Report, which uses global survey data to report how people evaluate their own lives in more than 150 countries worldwide. The World Happiness Report 2022 reveal...Read more...

CEP Insights

Wellbeing

As societies become richer, they do not become happier. This paradox has led to a growing interest in the science of wellbeing, and how policymakers can evaluate policies in terms of what will improve wellbeing. Economis...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Beyond income inequality: non-monetary rewards to work

Discussion of income inequality focuses primarily on wages with limited consideration of the non-monetary rewards to work, not least the satisfaction that employees experience in doing their jobs. Andrew Clark, Maria Cot...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2021

The World Happiness Report 2021 focuses on the effects of COVID-19 and how people all over the world have fared. Our aim was two-fold, first to focus on the effects of COVID-19 on the structure and quality of people's li...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Can we be happier?

If the goal for society is the greatest possible all-round happiness, how can that be achieved? Richard Layard and George Ward outline the evidence on what explains the huge variation in people's life satisfaction – and ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Employee wellbeing: the impact on productivity and firm performance

Does having happier staff mean higher productivity and improvements in companies' bottom line? A study of over 1.8 million employees across 73 countries by Christian Krekel, George Ward and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve detects a...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2019

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. The World Happiness Report 2019 focuses on happiness and th...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Income and Wealth:

Four decades of the economics of happiness: Where next?

There has been explosive growth in the analysis of subjective well-being in Economics over the past 40 years. This article reviews some of this growth, and suggests a number of domains in which future research may procee...Read more...