Wellbeing

Blog

The Conversation:

Why sharing meals can make people happier - what evidence from 142 countries shows

The importance of sharing meals is recognised across cultures, from the Jewish Shabbat meal to the fast-breaking Iftar meals during Ramadan. The known link between food and social relationships is ancient. The English wo...Read more...

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...

Journal article

Psychological Medicine : Forthcoming

Cost-benefit of IAPT Norway and effects on work-related outcomes and health care utilization: results from a randomized controlled trial using registry-based data

Data from an RCT of IAPT Norway (“Prompt Mental Health Care” [PMHC]) were linked to several administrative registers up to five years following the intervention. The aims were to (1) examine the effects of PMHC compared ...Read more...

Book

Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters

...Read more...

Blog

Lives well lived:

Richard Layard: the science of wellbeing (podcast)

Richard Layard is a British Labour Economist, a member of the House of Lords, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report. Layard highlights the role of life satisfaction and wellbeing in government policy, and the impo...Read more...

Journal article

Scottish Journal of Political Economy:

Parental time investments and instantaneous well-being in the United States

This study investigates the relationship between maternal education, child-care time, and well-being in the United States, with a particular focus on the role of societal norms. Highly educated mothers spend more time on...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How effective are R&D tax incentives? Reconciling micro and macro evidence

Recent firm-level studies find R&D tax incentives to be much more effective at stimulating firms' R&D investment than what aggregate analyses indicate. Based on a distributed analysis of official R&D survey and administr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of adult psychological therapies on employment and earnings: Evidence from England

People suffering from common mental disorders (CMD) such as depression and anxiety are more likely to be economically inactive. Psychological therapies are highly effective at treating CMDs but less is known about their ...Read more...

Journal article

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Forthcoming

The Easterlin Paradox at 50

We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries from 2009-2019 at both the individual and country levels to revisit the relationship between income and subjective wellbeing. Our inspiration is the paradox first pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is it possible to raise national happiness?

We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective a...Read more...

Journal article

Scientific Reports:

Machine learning in the prediction of human wellbeing

Subjective wellbeing data are increasingly used across the social sciences. Yet, despite the widespread use of such data, the predictive power of approaches commonly used to model wellbeing is only limited. In response, ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

The high price of doing nothing: evaluating an expansion of employment support for health-related inactivity

Employment support for those with mild-to-moderate health conditions is estimated to deliver large benefits to the individual and government finances, paying for itself within 5 years. This suggests enabling inactive ind...Read more...

Blog

Investment Uncut:

Happiness economics with Professor Lord Richard Layard (podcast)

Are you happy? Do you think you're happier than you were 20 years ago? Or, put a different way, why aren't you happier despite living in one of the wealthiest periods in history? Three simple questions, but all of them ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Income and Wealth:

Insecurity on the Labor Market

There is a common feeling that life has become more insecure over time. I here consider this proposition with respect to the labor market. I first discuss how labor-market insecurity might be measured, and then its poten...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Happy to Help: Welfare Effects of a Nationwide Volunteering Programme

We study the wellbeing returns from volunteering in England's National Health Service (NHS) Volunteer Responders, set up in response to Covid-19. Using linked survey and administrative data, we exploit the oversubscripti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Easterlin paradox at 50

We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries from 2009-2019 at both the individual and country levels to revisit the relationship between income and subjective wellbeing. Our inspiration is the paradox first pro...Read more...

Journal article

World Development: Forthcoming

Take the Highway? Paved roads and well-being in Africa

Public Goods aim to improve individual welfare. We investigate the causal consequences of roads on well-being in 24 African countries, instrumenting paved roads by 19th Century hypothetical lines between major ports and ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Investing in mental health is both a moral and an economic imperative

Mental illness is a leading cause of absenteeism and a driver of long-term sickness, which poses a significant economic cost due to economic inactivity. It accounts for half of all morbidity (the rate of disease in a pop...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Spending public money to create happier lives

Choosing policies that most improve wellbeing would radically change government priorities. David Frayman, Christian Krekel, Richard Layard, Sara MacLennan and Isaac Parkes explain the science behind the new approach....Read more...

Blog

The Rest is Money:

The economics of happiness (podcast)

Robert and Steph are joined by Lord Richard Layard, a 90 year old economist who has dedicated his life to researching and encouraging politicians to consider the happiness of their populations when taking decisions. Th...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Workers in finance from lower socio-economic backgrounds don't have equal voice

Employee voice refers to the informal and voluntary sharing of ideas, suggestions, concerns or opinions about work-related matters, with the goal of driving improvement or change. When voice is suppressed or marginalised...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Economic growth requires breaking the cycle of poor work and ill health

Work is an important part of our lives and crucial to wellbeing. But "good" work that offers security and autonomy is unevenly distributed. Workers in lower-paid jobs often find themselves trapped in "bad" jobs, characte...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Mental health support teams in schools: Evidence and assumptions

In this paper we examine the cost-effectiveness of providing NICE recommended psychological therapy to young people. For each type of mental health problem we show: (i) the assumptions used to derive the impact of treati...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Mental health and employment

In this report we evaluate the benefits and costs of providing NICE recommended treatment for addiction or severe mental health problems over a two-year time horizon for one individual. We separately investigate addictio...Read more...

Blog

IMF Finance and Development magazine:

A fivefold increase in remote work since the pandemic could boost economic growth and bring wider benefits

Economics is famous for being the dismal science. Sadly, recent work highlighting the slowdown in productivity growth stretching back to the 1950s is no exception. But here Nicholas Bloom takes a more cheerful view becau...Read more...

CEP report

Value for money: How to improve wellbeing and reduce misery

The government spends billions on our behalf. How do we want this money to be spent? This report reviews a range of policies and asks the fundamental question which should be asked of every policy: Does it deliver value ...Read more...

Chapter

Happiness and spatial inequality: past, present, and future

in Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing

Why are people happier in certain places as opposed to others? Understanding why people choose to live in a certain area, the elements they take into account when making this decision, and the value that they place on ea...Read more...

Chapter

World Happiness Report: origins, purpose, contents, impact and future

in Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing

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...

Chapter

Individual wellbeing and cortisol

in Encyclopedia of Happiness, Quality of Life and Subjective Wellbeing

The variety and the number of ways of measuring individual wellbeing has increased over the past two decades. In addition to all self-reported measures, researchers also consider a wide variety of objectively-measured in...Read more...

Journal article

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications:

The WELLBY: a new measure of social value and progress

We introduce the WELLBY, a new measure of social value and progress, which can contribute to the assessment of progress towards the wellbeing of the economy and steer towards activities with the most wellbeing per financ...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Wellbeing

Wellbeing should be the overarching aim of government. Assessing policies by showing the wellbeing benefit relative to cost would mean mental health becoming a top priority for policy development....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How our mistakes are judged can have lasting career impacts

Taking ownership of mistakes is daunting, particularly if your ego is easily bruised or your professional reputation is on the line. However, acknowledging your mistakes will lead to more innovative problem-solving and d...Read more...

Journal article

Child Indicators Research:

Economic Development and Adolescent Wellbeing in 139 Countries

There is a positive association between the level of economic development and national levels of overall life satisfaction (OLS) in the adult population, with decreasing marginal returns. However, research shows no assoc...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

An "army of people" investigating how to make work and life more enjoyable

Wellbeing science can help revolutionise government, work, school and life. Schools shouldn't train people only for work, and work should be enjoyable. People are now studying how to make this happen, because the well-be...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Where does money matter more?

There is much still to learn about the relationship between income and well-being, and in particular how this may depend on the economic and social context. We use Russian data to estimate individual Welfare Functions of...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The increasing complexity of digitalisation may hurt manual workers' health

Some of the effects of workplace digitalisation are well studied, such as changes in workers' wages and increased economic inequality. But how does technological progress affect workers' health? Melanie Arntz, Sebastian ...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Higher workload for police officers correlates with victims withdrawing statements

In the UK, partners or family members are responsible for nearly half of all female homicides. But there is an increasing rate of statement withdrawal from victims in high-risk domestic abuse cases. Tom Kirchmaier and Ek...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

The spiralling costs of higher education are hitting stay at home students harder

Since the pandemic, a new divide has emerged in higher education between commuter students, on the one hand, and on-campus students, on the other. Reporting on the findings of a new student money and wellbeing survey, Le...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Do wages underestimate the inequality in workers' rewards? The joint distribution of job quality and wages across occupations

Information on both wages and job quality is needed in order to understand the occupational dispersion of wellbeing. We analyse subjective wellbeing in a large UK sample to construct a measure of ‘overall reward’, the su...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Measuring Absolute Income Mobility: Lessons from North America and Europe

We use linked parent-child administrative data for five countries in North America and Europe, as well as detailed survey data for two more, to investigate methodological challenges in the estimation of absolute income m...Read more...

Blog

IZA World of Labor:

Mental health at scale

Common mental health problems, including depression and anxiety, significantly impact individuals and economies. In the UK, mental ill health constitutes the primary source of disability, while the economic costs of ment...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

The We Society (podcast):

Should governments care about wellbeing?

Professor Lord Richard Layard is one of the first economists to look at happiness as a metric that Governments worldwide should strive to improve in their population. He was the founder-director of LSE's Centre for Econ...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Does Employee Happiness Have an Impact on Productivity?

This paper provides evidence from a natural experiment on the relationship between positive affect and productivity. We link highly detailed administrative data on the behaviors and performance of all telesales workers a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Talking therapy: Impacts of a nationwide mental health service in England

Mental health problems impose significant costs, yet healthcare systems of-ten overlook them. We provide the first causal evidence on the effectiveness of a nationwide-scaled mental health service in England for treating...Read more...

CentrePiece article

How much is your time worth?

Wages indicate how much people want for their time at work, but how can we find out what value they place on time spent doing other things? Christian Krekel and George MacKerron analyse over two million responses to a sm...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:

Generational diversity is on the rise, and those embracing it are gaining a competitive edge

Major firms are experiencing a widening gap between their youngest and oldest employees. Daniel Jolles and Grace Lordan write that frictions which undermine the potential productivity benefits of generational diversity a...Read more...

CEP Insights

Insights: condensed

The Insights series is an introduction to the work of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). Each Insight highlights the contribution of CEP researchers to both academic understanding and policymaking in one area of ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Population Economics:

Teleworking and life satisfaction during COVID-19: the importance of family structure

We carry out a difference-in-differences analysis of a real-time survey conducted as part of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey and show that teleworking had a negative average effect on life satisfaction over...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why women say hybrid working enhances productivity, while men don't

There is a complex interplay between gender, remote work and productivity. Nikita, Anna Lane, Grace Lordan and Paul Middleton conducted a survey of more than 1000 employees in financial and professional services in the U...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Why household income doesn't tell the full story on individual wellbeing

The literature on inequality often focuses on household income, but this measure has several limitations for assessing individual wellbeing. Tim Obermeier develops a new collective household model which simultaneously ac...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics: Forthcoming

Social restrictions, leisure and well-being

A wide-ranging public debate surrounds how pandemic lockdown measures differentially impacted individuals and which precise mechanisms – whether financial-, health-, or policy-driven – predominate in determining these ef...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...

Journal article

Research in Labor Economics:

Effort at Work and Worker Well-Being

This chapter analyzes detailed 24-hour diary data from the United States to provide evidence on the relationship between workers’ effort and well-being while at work. In doing so, we first measure workers’ effort in term...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics: Forthcoming

The labour market returns to sleep

Despite the growing prevalence of insufficient sleep among individuals, we still know little about the labour market return to sleep. To address this gap, we use longitudinal data from Germany and leverage exogenous fluc...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

LSE Business Review:

To improve performance and inclusion, firms must break silos between teams

Investment in diversity, equity and inclusion is critical to business performance and ability to compete, but the lack of meaningful change remains a barrier to progress. An often-overlooked pathway to change is to work ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact:

Get Happier - podcasting made simple

Discussing the launch of his new podcast series 'Get Happier', Paul Dolan argues for the underrated power of checklists and mnemonics and shows how they can be applied through the medium of podcasting....Read more...

Blog

LSE EUROPP:

Interview with Neil Lee - "If we want to have innovative cities, they have to deliver for everyone"

In an interview with LSE Cities, Neil Lee discusses what's driving anti-metropolitan politics in Europe and how a more inclusive innovation economy could help address it....Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How have minorities been treated by the UK's judicial system?

Disparate treatment of minorities by the judicial system is not a construct of modern institutions. Irish defendants and victims faced harsher treatment and outcomes at London's Old Bailey in the 19th century. Lessons fr...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Will the NHS long-term workforce plan solve the current crisis?

Proposals to solve staffing shortages in the NHS focus on training more staff and retaining those already working in surgeries, clinics and hospitals. But Giuseppe Moscelli, Jo Blanden, Marco Mello and Melisa Sayli say t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do wind turbines have adverse health impacts

While wind power is considered key in the transition towards net zero, there are concerns about adverse health impacts on nearby residents. Based on precise geographical coordinates, we link a representative longitudinal...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why people quiet quit

There has been a surge in interest in quiet quitting, when employees put in only the minimum effort needed to keep their jobs, not showing interest in much more than that. Odessa Hamilton, Daniel Jolles and Grace Lordan ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Review of Books:

Book Review: Wellbeing: Science and Policy by Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve

In Wellbeing: Science and Policy, Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve present an enquiry into human wellbeing: what factors create it, how can it be effectively measured and how can it be improved? The authors' rich ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Don't let present bias keep you from getting ready for AI

Despite the quick pace of changes AI is producing in the workplace, many leaders are still not considering how things might soon be done very differently. 'Present bias' keeps them from leveraging new technologies to mak...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Should we call time on presenteeism?

Many companies have adopted a "remote first" approach for their workforce, but a growing number of firms are now demanding that employees work from the office most of the time. Jasmine Virhia and Grace Lordan warn firms ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How much is your time worth?

Christian Krekel and George MacKerron analyse more than two million data points from a smartphone app that randomly asks people how they feel at any particular moment and what they are currently doing, to provide estimat...Read more...

Journal article

Fiscal Studies:

New approaches to measuring welfare

Economics has traditionally understood 'welfare' (what makes a life go well) as the satisfaction of preference. This conceptualisation of welfare is typically measured using revealed preferences, proxied through income a...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Why leaders must keep their ego in check

The ego, if left unchecked, can pose big problems in the workplace. Nikita and Grace Lordan list five of these problems and discuss how a leader can take steps to mitigate them....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are the upwardly mobile more left-wing?

It is well-known that the wealthier are more likely to have Right-leaning political preferences. We here in addition consider the role of the individual's starting position, and in particular their upward social mobility...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...

Journal article

Information Technology & People:

Well-being and Working from Home during Covid-19

The authors track the well-being of individuals across five European countries during the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and relate their well-being to working from home. The authors also cons...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Back to Edgeworth? Estimating the value of time using hedonic experiences

Following early economist Francis Y. Edgeworth's proposal to measure people's hedonic experiences as they go about their daily lives, we use a smartphone app that over seven years randomly asked a panel of 30, 928 UK res...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...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Will the NHS long-term workforce plan solve the current crisis?

New proposals to solve staffing shortages in the NHS focus on training more staff and retaining those already working in surgeries, clinics and hospitals. But the plan may be insufficiently ambitious; and it requires mor...Read more...

Blog

Working on Wellbeing:

Lord Richard Layard on putting wellbeing top of the policy agenda (podcast)

Richard Layard talks to Sarah Cunningham about how wellbeing science has developed over the past half-century, and how he is calling on policymakers and business leaders to put wellbeing at the heart of decision-making....Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The wellbeing costs of inflation inequalities

Some people face sharper increases in the prices they pay than others - and since inflation makes everyone miserable, they also experience greater loss of happiness. Alberto Prati assesses the costs of such inflation ine...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...

Journal article

Scientific Reports: Forthcoming

Happiness predicts compliance with preventive health behaviours during Covid-19 lockdowns

To combat the public health crisis of Covid-19, governments and public health officials have been asking individuals to substantially change their behaviours for prolonged periods of time. Are happier people more willing...Read more...

Blog

LSE Impact of Social Sciences:

A new science of wellbeing will change policy and decision making

What produces a happy society and a happy life? Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve suggest that through the new science of wellbeing, we can now answer this question empirically. Explaining how wellbeing can be meas...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...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What is the role of government in creating a happier world?

The latest edition of the World Happiness Report offers new insights into wellbeing across the globe. The past year has brought a number of fresh challenges, but many people are still able to find happiness in their live...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

How women are changing the face of economics

Economics continues to be a discipline dominated by men. Yet trailblazing female economists are working to change that. Myung Jin explains why it is important to improve diversity and equality within the field....Read more...

Book

Wellbeing: Science and Policy

What produces a happy society and a happy life? Thanks to the new science of wellbeing, we can now answer this question using state-of-the-art empirical evidence. This transforms our ability to base our decisions on the ...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics :

Macroeconomic conditions when young shape job preferences for life

Preferences for monetary and nonmonetary job attributes are important for understanding workers' motivation and the organization of work. Little is known, however, about how those job preferences are formed. We study how...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

LSE Business Review:

Why older talent should be a consideration for today's inclusive leader

While 'age' has not been historically underrepresented in our workforces, creating longer, fulfilling working lives is now an economic imperative. Daniel Jolles and Grace Lordan break down three persistent myths about ol...Read more...

Journal article

European Journal of Social Psychology:

Worldview defence and self-determination theory explain the return of racial voting: evidence from the 2016 US election

We use self-determination (SDT) and worldview defence theories (WDT) to explicate the psychological roots of identitarian voting in recent US, UK and EU elections. We test our theory using the 2016 US election as a case ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

UTOPIA and the City: the future of work in financial and professional services

In the midst of a reorganisation of work caused by the pandemic, there is no one-size-fits-all arrangement and employers are battling to find the right mix between office and home working. To learn more about how to get ...Read more...

Blog

NHS England:

What's in a name? NHS Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression - the new name for IAPT services

Improving Access to Psychological Therapy (IAPT) services are being renamed as NHS Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression, following a public consultation. Professor David M Clark and Dr Adrian Whittington reflect ...Read more...

Blog

The Work Goes On:

Richard Layard on his life in public service and his pioneering research on happiness (podcast)

Richard Layard joins Orley Ashenfelter on podcast 'The Work Goes On', to talk about his life in public service, his advocacy on behalf of the unemployed, and his pioneering research on happiness, life satisfaction, and m...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Income and Wealth :

The well-being cost of inflation inequalities

In terms of well-being, how costly is inflation? To answer this question, empirical evaluations have typically studied average inflation rates at the national level, thus disregarding the role of inflation inequalities w...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization :

Occupational status and life satisfaction in the UK: the miserable middle?

We use British panel data to explore the link between occupational status and life satisfaction. We find puzzling evidence for men of a U-shaped relationship in cross-section data: employees in medium-status occupations ...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...

CEP discussion paper

Non-tariff barriers and consumer prices: evidence from Brexit

Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs) are the main policy impediment to international trade, yet little is known about their pass-through to prices. This paper exploits the Brexit trade policy shock to quantify how NTBs affect cons...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization : Forthcoming

Should bads be inflicted all at once, like Machiavelli said? Evidence from life-satisfaction data

Is wellbeing, measured by life satisfaction, higher if the same number of negative events is spread out rather than bunched in time? Is it better if positive events are spread out or bunched? We answer these questions em...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How should we decide when to use artificial intelligence in decision-making?

Should organisations adopt artificial intelligence in their decision-making processes? Grace Lordan, Paris Will, and Dario Krpan write that AI-based methods lead to more efficient hiring decisions, increasing diversity o...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics: Forthcoming

Gender, loneliness and happiness during Covid-19

We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can grit be taught? Lessons from a nationwide field experiment with middle-school students

We study whether a particular socio-emotional skill - grit (the ability to sustain effort and interest towards long-term goals) - can be cultivated through a large-scale program, and how this affects student learning. Us...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Education : Forthcoming

Inequalities in late adolescents' educational experiences and wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic

While the health risks of Covid-19 for young people are low, they have borne a heavy cost of the pandemic through intense disruption to their education and social lives. These effects have not been experienced equally ac...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

LSE Europp:

The well-being cost of inflation inequalities

Inflation is not distributed equally across society. Alberto Prati assesses the wellbeing cost of inflation inequalities in France, showing why measuring them is important for a policy agenda that places citizens' wellbe...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization:

Occupational prestige and life satisfaction in the UK: the miserable middle?

We use British panel data to explore the link between occupational status and life satisfaction. We find puzzling evidence for men of a U-shaped relationship in cross-section data: employees in medium-status occupations ...Read more...

Blog

Vox Dev:

Responsible sourcing? Theory and evidence from Costa Rica

The authors investigate whether responsible sourcing policies implemented by multinational enterprises for their suppliers have impacts on the ground and, if they do, what these mean for firms and workers in the host cou...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The well-being cost of inflation inequalities

In terms of well-being, how costly is inflation? To answer this question, empirical evaluations have typically studied average inflation rates at the national level, thus disregarding the role of inflation inequalities w...Read more...

Chapter

Accounting for consequences and claims in policy

in Wellbeing: Alternative policy perspectives

Fully appraising any policy requires us to capture all of its ripple effects and not simply the size of the splash when the pebble of intervention hits the water. It also requires that we weight the value of those effect...Read more...

Chapter

Wellbeing as the goal of policy

in Wellbeing: Alternative policy perspectives

When policy-makers have multiple objectives, they still need an over-arching criterion which determines the importance of the different objectives. The most reasonable criterion is the wellbeing of the population. Fortun...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How to future-proof your career

The job market is in constant flux; industries change or become obsolete and new technologies emerge and disrupt. In conversation with Jasmine Virhia, Grace Lordan explains what strategies we can put in place now to make...Read more...

Journal article

Scientific reports:

Characteristics associated with Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy

Understanding what lies behind actual COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is fundamental to help policy makers increase vaccination rates and reach herd immunity. We use June 2021 data from the COME-HERE survey to explore the pre...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Human wellbeing and machine learning

There is a vast literature on the determinants of subjective wellbeing. International organisations and statistical offices are now collecting such survey data at scale. However, standard regression models explain surpri...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

The sanctification of science during the pandemic

Maja Graso and Paul Dolan examine the manifestations and consequences of firmly-held beliefs in COVID-19 science....Read more...

Blog

LSE Review of Books:

Book review: A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making by Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel

In A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making, Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel offer a new guide to wellbeing-driven public policy, focusing on the proposal to replace GDP with wellbeing as the key metric to assess societ...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...

CentrePiece article

Reducing gender gaps in mathematics education

Girls and young women underperform in mathematics relative to their male peers - a loss of talent that may hinder productivity growth. Almudena Sevilla and Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz explain how new developments in gender economi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What makes a satisfying life? Prediction and interpretation with machine-learning algorithms

Machine Learning (ML) methods are increasingly being used across a variety of fields and have led to the discovery of intricate relationships between variables. We here apply ML methods to predict and interpret life sati...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Income and Wealth:

Pandemic policy and life satisfaction in Europe

We use data from the COME-HERE longitudinal survey collected by the University of Luxembourg to assess the effects of the policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfaction in France, Germany, Italy, Spain an...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

What we learnt about the Covid economy

In spring 2020, many countries imposed radical, urgent actions including lockdowns to protect their citizens' health - but there was also a need to protect people from the worst of the ensuing economic storm. Academics a...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics of the Household:

Do individuals adapt to all types of housing transitions?

This paper provides one of the first tests of adaptation to the complete set of residential transitions. We use long-run SOEP panel data and consider the impact of all housing transitions, whether or not they involve a c...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Return to work: a dictionary of behavioural biases

Firms are increasingly allowing their employees to decide if they work at home or in the office. But the return to work is fraught with many biases. Julia Bladinieres-Justo, Aleesha Bruce, Anisah Ramli, Nichaphat Surawat...Read more...

Blog

LSE Europp:

Evidence from Greece: the potential pitfalls of using education as a welfare policy instrument

Policymakers frequently use education as a welfare policy instrument. But can these policies have unintended consequences? Christos Genakos and Eleni Kyrkopoulou present findings from a case study in Greece where a socia...Read more...

Blog

The Royal Society:

What actually makes us happy?

Professor Lord Richard Layard considers the importance of wellbeing and happiness amongst our young people for their future....Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

What do we know so far about the effect of school closures on educational inequality?

Nearly all schools closed at some point during the pandemic. Reviewing the evidence so far, Jo Blanden, Matthias Doepke and Jan Stuhler warn that these closures will have a major negative impact on educational inequality...Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine: Forthcoming

"Better the devil you know": Are stated preferences over health and happiness determined by how healthy and happy people are?

Most people want to be both happy and healthy. But which matters most when there is a trade-off between them? This paper addresses this question by asking 4000 members of the UK and US public to make various choices betw...Read more...

Blog

UK in a Changing Europe:

Levelling up education

Andrew Eyles examines the UK's levelling up white paper, explaining how the plans for education may need to go further to be fully effective....Read more...

Journal article

Japanese Economic Review:

The Joneses in Japan: income comparisons and financial satisfaction

This paper uses relatively large-scale internet survey data from Japan to analyse income comparisons and income satisfaction. In contrast to the vast majority of empirical work in the area of subjective well-being, we ar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of mental health support for the chronically ill on hospital utilisation: evidence from the UK

Individuals with common mental disorders (CMDs) such as depression and anxiety frequently have co-occurring long-term physical health conditions (LTCs) and this co-occurrence is associated with higher hospital utilisatio...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The hidden costs of incentivising later retirement

Over the past two decades, many countries have reformed their public pension systems in pursuit of desirable fiscal effects, often by introducing or strengthening incentives for later retirement. However, the welfare eff...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

What can we learn from the latest World Happiness Report?

Now in its tenth year, Maria Cotofan explains how the World Happiness Report offers an insight into the progress that has been made - both in terms of understanding the determinants of global wellbeing and in recognising...Read more...

Blog

Africa at LSE:

How multinationals exploited a health crisis to accelerate deforestation in Liberia

The way multinational enterprises conduct themselves during periods of crisis, such as an epidemic, is of key importance in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. A health crisis may alter the short-run incentives of some multi...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...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How can we reduce gender gaps in mathematics education?

Underperformance by girls and young women in mathematics relative to their male peers is a loss of talent that may hinder productivity growth. Almudena Sevilla and Pilar Cuevas-Ruiz explore new developments in our unders...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Economic consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine: views of leading economists

Romesh Vaitilingam reports on the views of leading economists concerning the likely economic consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the responses by the international community....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Football, alcohol and domestic abuse

Reports of domestic abuse rise after football matches. Ria Ivandic, Tom Kirchmaier and Neus Torres-Blas find that binge drinking is the key factor - with alcohol-linked violence against live-in partners happening more of...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Will the US child tax credit reduce poverty and improve outcomes for children and parents?

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily increased the value of the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,000 for children aged 6-16 and to $3,600 for younger children. To date, the Biden administration has been una...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Teleworking is here to stay and may raise productivity if implemented appropriately

The pandemic triggered a surge in teleworking, raising questions about its persistence as well as its impact on firm performance and worker wellbeing. This column argues that teleworking is here to stay - for most worker...Read more...

Journal article

Gerontology:

Location, location, location: the role of objective neighborhood characteristics for perceptions of control

Introduction: Control beliefs can protect against age-related declines in functioning. It is unclear whether neighborhood characteristics shape how much control people perceive over their life. This article studies assoc...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Why wellbeing should be the goal of policy

Wherever there is a fixed budget constraint, money should be allocated to policies which give the greatest increase in wellbeing per pound of expenditure, argues Richard Layard. Even policy-makers unmoved by wellbeing as...Read more...

Journal article

Perspectives on Psychological Science: Forthcoming

Mental health during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic: a review and recommendations for moving forward

COVID-19 has infected millions of people and upended the lives of most humans on the planet. Researchers from across the psychological sciences have sought to document and investigate the impact of COVID-19 in myriad way...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Have you quit your New Year's resolution by Quitter's Day?

Many people make New Year's resolutions, but by mid-January most resolutions will have been left aside. Workouts are skipped in favour of Netflix. Salads are shunned in favour of pasta. And across the UK Dry January is r...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Opening the black box of hospital mergers

Despite the current wave of US hospital mergers, it is unclear how they change behaviour and performance. Martin Gaynor, Adam Sacarny, Raffaella Sadun, Chad Syverson and Shruthi Venkatesh show that while mergers have ach...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

The environmental burden of the international job market for economists

Each year, the 'international job market for economists' involves over 1,000 junior candidates and several hundred recruiters from all over the world meeting for short pre-screening interviews at annual congresses in Eur...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Prosociality and the pandemic: adolescents from poorer backgrounds suffered more

Camille Terrier, Daniel L Chen and Matthias Sutter look at how Covid-19 infections affected adolescents' prosociality, an essential non-cognitive skill. The prosociality gap between students with high and low socio-econo...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Robust ranking of happiness outcomes: a median regression perspective

Ordered probit and logit models have been frequently used to estimate the mean ranking of happiness outcomes (and other ordinal data) across groups. However, it has been recently highlighted that such ranking may not be ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How we feel depends on what we pay attention to

Policymakers are increasingly focusing on wellbeing as a policy goal, leaning on wellbeing measures to aid their work. Paul Dolan writes that the existing frameworks fail to properly account for the fundamental mechanism...Read more...

Journal article

Health and Place:

Income-related health inequality in urban China (1991-2015): the role of homeownership and housing conditions

Unprecedented economic growth has been experienced over the several decades worldwide, but such rapid economic growth wasn't accompanied by equally-substantial improvement in health, especially health inequalities betwee...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

SMILE in 2022

As 2021 draws to a close, Grace Lordan offers six life lessons rooted in the behavioural sciences that will make you SMILE....Read more...

Journal article

International Journal of Health Planning and Management: Forthcoming

Medical disputes and patient satisfaction in China: How does hospital management matter?

Objective: Satisfaction with healthcare may be captured by surveys of patients and staff, or in extreme cases, the number and severity of medical disputes. This study tries to investigate the relationship between satisfa...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership:

Footsie,Yeah! Share Prices and Worker Wellbeing

A small literature has shown that individual wellbeing varies with the price of company stock, but it is unclear whether this is due to wealth effects amongst those holding stock, or more general effects on sentiment, wi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics:

Faster, higher, stronger… and happier? Relative achievement and marginal rank effects

Most prior research on the relationship between relative attainment and subjective wellbeing focuses on relative income. The direction of this relationship may, however, be positive or negative. Defining the target compa...Read more...

Journal article

Land Economics: Forthcoming

Urban land use fragmentation and human wellbeing

We study how land use fragmentation affects the life satisfaction of city dwellers. To this end, we calculate fragmentation metrics based on exact geographical coordinates of land use from the European Urban Atlas and of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

"Better the devil you know": are stated preferences over health and happiness determined by how healthy and happy people are?

Most people want to be both happy and healthy. But which matters most when there is a trade-off between them? This paper addresses this question by asking 4,000 members of the public in the UK and the US to make various ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

If you lie down with clones you will stagnate your career

We have a tendency to surround ourselves with and ask advice from people just like ourselves, putting us at risk of confirmation bias. When we want personal growth, Grace Lordan writes that we must think again about who ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happy to help: NHS volunteering in Covid-19 times

The Covid-19 crisis prompted thousands to register as NHS Volunteer Responders, helping vulnerable people with small daily tasks like shopping. Christian Krekel and colleagues find big increases in wellbeing among those ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Poland's economy in the pandemic

The Polish economy has largely managed to avoid the pandemic-induced troubles experienced in Western Europe. But as Pawel Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos argue, contrary to government claims of able stewardship, what has got ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Learning loss since lockdown

Young people in education have lost significant amounts of time in school during the pandemic - and this carries risks of lifetime scars. Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin reveal the scale of learning los...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Inclusion in the workplace: how not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

Sitting at a focal point between east and west, Singapore has a nuanced and multi-layered cultural landscape that exemplify the importance of context for behavioural interventions to promote diversity and inclusion (D&I)...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

The Welfare Consequences of Centralization: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in Switzerland

Many countries are reallocating tasks and powers to more central levels of government. To identify centralization's welfare effects, I use a difference-in-differences design that relies on time and cross-cantonal variati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Internet access and its implications for productivity, inequality and resilience

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology:

Life Satisfaction and the Human Development Index across the World

We use annual data on over 150 countries between 2005 and 2018 to look at the relationship between subjective well-being (both cognitive and affective) and the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI appears to be more cl...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Narrative traps: how can we avoid them in making decisions about Covid?

How have we made decisions about handling Covid-19? Did they take account of trade-offs to individual welfare, or were they prone to narrative bias? Amanda Henwood (LSE) discusses a recent report written with Paul Dolan ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: A longitudinal study of lottery wins

Would improving women's access to capital reduce the gender entrepreneurial gap? We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing between large to small winners, we find that an increase ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

A local community course that raises wellbeing and pro-sociality: Evidence from a randomised controlled trial

Despite a wealth of research on its correlates, relatively little is known about how to effectively raise wellbeing in local communities by means of intervention. Can we teach people to live happier lives, cost-effective...Read more...

Blog

What Works Wellbeing:

Book launch - a handbook for wellbeing policy-making

Christian Krekel gives an overview of his new book, co-authored with Paul Frijters, about the realities of policy-making and how wellbeing measures can improve what the public sector does....Read more...

Journal article

Scandinavian Journal of Economics:

Living in the Shadow of the Past: Financial Profiles and Well-Being

We consider the link between individual financial profiles over time and well-being, as measured by life satisfaction. In particular, we look at annual self-reported financial worsening and improvement information for mo...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Locked-in syndrome: why this must all end on 19 July

Zero COVID is unachievable, write Paul Dolan (LSE) and Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford). Continuing to impose restrictions inflicts disproportionate harm on the young, small businesses and creative industries....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Marriage as insurance: job protection and job insecurity in France

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it. We here consider marriage as a way of insuring against labour-market risk. The 199...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How should we measure the impact of Covid-19 policies on our wellbeing?

Paul Dolan and Christian Krekel explain how measuring changes in life experience, as well as life expectancy, will enable richer evaluation of policies....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...

CentrePiece article

The motherhood penalty for working women in Spain

Spain has seen a huge influx of women into the workplace in recent decades, but their experiences of work remain very different from those of men. As Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela explain, there is scope for...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Happy to help: how a UK micro-volunteering programme increased people's wellbeing

Levels of wellbeing increased significantly for individuals who participated in the NHS Volunteer Responders (NHSVR) programme, with effects lasting months after the volunteering period had ended, write Paul Dolan, Chris...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happy to help: welfare effects of a nationwide volunteering programme

We study the wellbeing benefits from volunteering in England's National Health Service (NHS) Volunteer Responders programme, which was set up in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using combined survey and administrative...Read more...

Book

A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making
History, Theory, Measurement, Implementation, and Examples

Around the world, governments are starting to directly measure the subjective wellbeing of their citizens and to use it for policy evaluation and appraisal. What would happen if a country were to move from using GDP to u...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Vaccines for developing countries: the costs and benefits of waiving patents

There is much debate about whether the patents on COVID-19 vaccines should be waived to allow low-income countries to produce doses for themselves. The Initiative on Global Markets Forum's survey asked European and US ex...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

How to improve tax compliance: Evidence from population-wide experiments in Belgium

Tax compliance lies at the heart of well-functioning societies, but the US and Europe spend vast sums annually to enforce it. This column discusses the results of population-wide experiments run in collaboration with the...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Why the UK-India Young Professionals Scheme might end up benefitting a handful of large companies

The announcement of a new visa for young, professional Indians to work in the UK could prove popular - but an eye needs to be kept on how it ends up being used in practice, writes Alan Manning....Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

Don't let fears about the Indian variant stop us thinking rationally about risk

Now that those at greater risk of developing a serious case of COVID-19 have been vaccinated, B.1.617.2 - the 'Indian variant' - is less of a danger to the UK. Paul Dolan, Christian Krekel and George Wharton (LSE) argue ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Lockdowns widen the gender gap in mental health

Women, the young, and the less educated have borne the brunt of the economic damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns in terms of job and earnings losses. As this column reports, women have also suffered far ...Read more...

Journal article

The Lancet Public Health :

Policy stringency and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal analysis of data from 15 countries

To date, public health policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic have been evaluated on the basis of their ability to reduce transmission and minimise economic harm. We aimed to assess the association between COV...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The importance of capital in closing the entrepreneurial gender gap: a longitudinal study of lottery wins

Can capital constraints explain why there are more male than female entrepreneurs in most societies? We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing between large to small winners, we fi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Take the highway? Paved roads and well-being in Africa

Public Goods aim to improve individual welfare. We investigate the causal consequences of roads on well-being in 24 African countries, instrumenting paved roads by 19th Century hypothetical lines between major ports and ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Beyond income inequality: factoring in non-monetary rewards

While many researchers, policy makers, and interest groups are concerned with income inequality and its impact on society, much of the debate has focused on inequality in wages. In contrast, relatively little work has ad...Read more...

Journal article

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin:

Inequality and Social Rank: Income Increases Buy More Life Satisfaction in More Equal Countries

How do income and income inequality combine to influence subjective well-being? We examined the relation between income and life satisfaction in different societies, and found large effects of income inequality within a ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does growing up in a recession increase compassion? The case of attitudes towards immigration

Macroeconomic conditions during young adulthood have a persistent impact on people's attitudes and preferences. The seminal paper by Giuliano and Spilimbergo (2014) shows that people who grew up in a recession are more l...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies:

Comparing Conventional and Machine-Learning Approaches to Risk Assessment in Domestic Abuse Cases

We compare predictions from a conventional protocol-based approach to risk assessment with those based on a machine-learning approach. We first show that the conventional predictions are less accurate than, and have simi...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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

World Happiness Report: living long and living well

The 2021 World Happiness Report comes as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to claim lives and lay waste to livelihoods around the world. Richard Layard and Ekaterina Oparina introduce the WELLBY Approach and look at how we...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How have school closures affected children's mental health?

Children in year groups that were not priorities to return to school before the 2020 summer holidays experienced greater average declines in their mental health. As schools re-open, it is vital to balance efforts to make...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

How a focus on wellbeing can help us make better policy decisions

Deaths, hospitalisations and cases have been the default metrics for policymakers during the pandemic. Paul Dolan (LSE) and a team of behavioural science experts propose a broader way of measuring policy outcomes that co...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Is Tokyo 2020 worth it?

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games have been rescheduled to take place in July and August this year. Christian Krekel uses tools from the new science of wellbeing to assess whether the event should still go ahead and how likel...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Build back happier

In CEP’s first anniversary lecture marking 30 years since the Centre began, founder director Richard Layard outlined the science of wellbeing and its implications for public policy. As society tries to recover from the c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Maternal depression and child human capital: a genetic instrumental-variable approach

We here address the causal relationship between maternal depression and child human capital using UK cohort data. We exploit the conditionally-exogenous variation in mothers? genomes in an instrumental-variable approach,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The true returns to the choice of occupation and education

Which occupations are best for wellbeing? There is a large literature on earnings differentials, but less attention has been paid to occupational differences in non-pecuniary rewards. However, information on both types o...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Business and Economic Statistics: Forthcoming

Analyzing Subjective Well-Being Data with Misclassification

We use novel nonparametric techniques to test for the presence of nonclassical measurement error in reported life satisfaction (LS) and study the potential effects from ignoring it. Our dataset comes from Wave 3 of the U...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

(Un)happiness and voting in U.S. presidential elections.

A rapidly growing literature has attempted to explain Donald Trump's success in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a result of a wide variety of differences in individual characteristics, attitudes, and social proces...Read more...

Journal article

Health Economics (United Kingdom):

Childhood circumstances and young adulthood outcomes: The role of mothers' financial problems

We here consider the cognitive and noncognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use UK data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and ...Read more...

Journal article

Applied Research in Quality of Life: Forthcoming

Pioneer in Subjective Quality of Life Research: Andrew Clark

Andrew Clark talks about his life and career in subjective quality of life research...Read more...

Blog

Bloomberg Stephanomics Podcasts:

The economic cost of Covid-19's mental health crisis

Richard Layard talks about why the coronavirus should make us rethink how we treat mental illness, how "building back better" should mean services rather than roads and railways, and why money really doesn't make us happ...Read more...

Journal article

Vienna Yearbook of Population Research:

The age U-shape in Europe: The protective role of partnership

In this study, we ask whether the U-shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age is flatter for individuals who are partnered. An analysis of cross-sectional EU-SILC data indicates that the decline in life satis...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

COVID-19, lockdowns and well-being: Evidence from Google Trends

The COVID-19 pandemic and government intervention such as lockdowns may severely affect people's mental health. While lockdowns can help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to popula...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: Evidence from British cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We h...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Early-life correlates of later-life well-being: Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

We here use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to provide one of the first analyses of the distal (early-life) and proximal (later-life) correlates of older-life subjective well-being. Unusually, we have tw...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19:

What happened when parents lost their jobs during lockdown?

Many parents had to cope with losing their jobs or part of their income at the same time as they were forced to home school. How did this affect their children's learning and their mental health? Claudia Hupkau, Ingo Isp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the externalities of renewable energy plants using wellbeing data: the case of biogas

Although there is strong support for renewable energy plants, they are often met with local resistance. We quantify the externalities of renewable energy plants using well-being data. We focus on the example of biogas, o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quality of life in a dynamic spatial model

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatia...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Work, care, and gender across UK lockdowns

A growing body of research is making clear the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across gender. This column explores what the likely implications of a second lockdown in the UK are for gender equality at work and i...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happier lives: exploring what matters

Can we teach people to live happier and more pro-social lives? Are there cost-effective and scalable interventions? And could the effects be sustained over time? Christian Krekel and colleagues have evaluated the impact ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Population Economics:

Children, unhappiness and family finances

The common finding of a zero or negative correlation between the presence of children and parental well-being continues to generate research interest. We consider international data, including well over one million obser...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Are happier people more compliant? Global evidence from three large-scale surveys during Covid-19 lockdowns

Around the world, governments have been asking their citizens to practice physical distancing and stay at home to contain the spread of Covid-19. Are happier people more willing to comply with these measures? Using three...Read more...

Blog

The BMJ Opinion:

Taking a wellbeing-years approach to policy choice

Every day, policy makers have to decide whether a policy is desirable. They do so by examining its impact on a whole range of outcomes. But the problem is how to aggregate these disparate outcomes against issues such as ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Parental well-being in times of Covid-19 in Germany

We examine the differential effects of Covid-19 and related restrictions on individuals with dependent children in Germany. We specifically focus on the role of school and day care center closures, which may be regarded ...Read more...

Blog

LSE US Centre:

How economists view the US debate on extending jobless benefits

Experts discuss the trade-offs between work incentives and income support; whether top-ups should be reduced, and how economics and public health might determine federal contribution levels, writes Romesh Vaitilingam....Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Gender norms, fairness and relative working hours within households

Using data in the United States, UK and Germany, we show that women whose working hours exceed those of their male partners report lower life satisfaction on average. By contrast, men do not report lower life satisfactio...Read more...

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy:

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. W...Read more...

Journal article

Behavioural Public Policy:

A happy choice: a response to the responses

We are very happy to see the engagement of so many eminent scholars in our field with our modest proposal for how to proceed with wellbeing policy formation in the UK. We are also heartened by the apparent endorsement of...Read more...

Blog

LSE Covid-19 blog:

How a job guarantee scheme can avoid the slide into long-term unemployment

Even if COVID-19 infection rates dwindle, it is now clear that the economy is unlikely to bounce back quickly. This raises the spectre of long-term unemployment. Richard Layard (LSE) explains how the government could dra...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2020

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 2020 for the first time ranks ci...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Covid-19, lockdowns and well-being: evidence from Google trends

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments to implement lockdowns. While lockdowns may help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to population well-being. We use Google Trends dat...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

When to release the lockdown: a wellbeing framework for analysing costs and benefits

In choosing when to end the lockdown, policy-makers have to balance the impact of the decision upon incomes, unemployment, mental health, public confidence and many other factors, as well as (of course) upon the number o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A natural experiment on job insecurity and fertility in France

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. We here argue that it reduces fertility amongst the employed. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by large private firms when th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Machiavelli versus concave utility functions: should bads be spread out or concentrated?

Is wellbeing higher if the same number of negative events is spread out rather than bunched in time? Should positive events be spread out or bunched? We answer these questions exploiting quarterly data on six positive an...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Budget 2020: will it move the economy onto a sustainable and inclusive growth path?

The UK's challenges around productivity, regional disparities and the transition to net zero emissions are complex and interconnected, made even more so by the coronavirus outbreak and Brexit. Anna Valero argues that whi...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...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

We can increase happiness through public policy - and in our jobs and private lives too

As research shows us what makes us happy, a world happiness movement is being born, write Richard Layard and George Ward....Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Covid-19: We shouldn't give priority to sustaining the GDP over the wellbeing of the people

If we handle the coronavirus crisis right, we can come out of it better than we went into it, says Richard Layard...Read more...

Blog

LSE News:

Artificial intelligence could help protect victims of domestic violence

Ria Ivandic finds in the United States, roughly one in four women experience serious intimate partner violence over their lifetimes...Read more...

Book

Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics

Most people now realise that economic growth, however desirable, will not solve all our problems. Instead, we need a philosophy and a science which encompasses a much fuller range of human need and experience.This book a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A local community course that raises mental wellbeing and pro-sociality

Although correlates of mental wellbeing have been extensively studied, relatively little is known about how to effectively raise mental wellbeing in local communities by means of intervention. We conduct a randomised con...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The motivational cost of inequality: pay gaps reduce the willingness to pursue rewards

Factors beyond a person?s control, such as demographic characteristics at birth, often influence the availability of rewards an individual can expect for their efforts. We know surprisingly little how such pay-gaps due t...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The long-term effects of financial distress in childhood

Is there a relationship between childhood circumstances and outcomes later in life? Andrew Clark and colleagues consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences for young adults whose families experienced major fina...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic insecurity and the rise of the right

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention in social, academic and policy circles. However, there is no consensus as to its precise definition. Intuitively, economic insecurity is multi-faceted, making any compr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. W...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does employee happiness have an impact on productivity?

This article provides quasi-experimental evidence on the relationship between employee happiness and productivity in the field. We study the universe of call center sales workers at British Telecom (BT), one of the Unite...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

The causes and consequences of early-adult unemployment: Evidence from cohort data

We here use the employment-history data from the British Cohort Study to calculate an individual's total experience of unemployment from the time they left education up to age 30. We show that, conditional on current une...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Quantifying the intangible impact of the Olympics using subjective well-being data

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi-experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in Lond...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Quantifying the intangible impact of the Olympics using subjective well-being data

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi-experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in Lond...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Who Got the Brexit Blues? The Effect of Brexit on Subjective Wellbeing in the UK

We use the 2015–16 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society) to look at subjective wellbeing around the time of the June 2016 EU membership Referendum in the UK (Brexit). We employ measures of ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Healthy minds: the positive impact of a new school curriculum

As the UK government prepares to make personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education compulsory, a recent trial shows how these subjects can be taught successfully. Grace Lordan and Alistair McGuire evaluate the ...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...

CEP discussion paper

Widening the high school curriculum to include soft skill training: impacts on health, behaviour, emotional wellbeing and occupational aspirations

From 2020 the health and relationships aspects of Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education will be compulsory in UK schools for adolescents. However less is known about how it can be taught in an effective manner....Read more...

Journal article

Review of Income and Wealth:

Neighbors' Income, Public Goods, and Well-Being

How does neighbors' income affect individual well-being? Our analysis is based on rich U.S. local data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains information on where respondents live and their s...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How to improve tax compliance? Evidence from population-wide experiments in Belgium

We study the impact of deterrence, tax morale, and simplifying information on tax compliance. We ran _ve experiments spanning the tax process which varied the communication of the tax administration with all income taxpa...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Childhood circumstances and young adult outcomes: the role of parental financial problems

Is there a relationship between childhood circumstances and outcomes later on in life? Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D’Ambrosio, and Marta Barazzetta consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences on young adults who ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Childhood circumstances and young adulthood outcomes: the role of mothers' financial problems

We here consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use UK data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employee wellbeing, productivity and firm performance

Does higher employee wellbeing lead to higher productivity, and, ultimately, to tangible benefits to the bottom line of businesses? We survey the evidence and study this question in a meta-analysis of 339 independent res...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

The Lancet:

Transparency about the outcomes of mental health services (IAPT approach): an analysis of public data

Background: Internationally, the clinical outcomes of routine mental health services are rarely recorded or reported; however, an exception is the English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service, which...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of the Brexit referendum result on subjective well-being

We study the effect of the Brexit referendum result on subjective well-being in the United Kingdom. Using a quasi-experimental design, we find that this outcome led to an overall decrease in subjective well-being in the ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

War, migration and the origins of the Thai sex industry

This paper analyzes the determinants behind the spatial distribution of the sex industry in Thailand. We relate the development of the sex industry to an early temporary demand shock, that is, US military presence during...Read more...

Journal article

European Journal of Population:

Happy People Have Children: Choice and Self-Selection into Parenthood

There is mixed evidence in the existing literature on whether children are associated with greater subjective well-being, with the correlation depending on which countries and populations are considered. We here provide ...Read more...

Journal article

Social Science and Medicine:

Life satisfaction, QALYs, and the monetary value of health

The monetary value of a quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) is frequently used to assess the benefits of health interventions and inform funding decisions. However, there is little consensus on methods for the estimation o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Medical marijuana laws and mental health in the United States

The consequences of legal access to medical marijuana for individual welfare are a matter of controversy. We contribute to the ongoing discussion by evaluating the impact of the staggered introduction and extension of me...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

The asymmetric experience of positive and negative economic growth: Global evidence using subjective well-being data

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth?We find that measures of subjective well-being are more than twice as sensitive to negative as compared to positive economic growth. We use ...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners?

Constraints that prevent women from working longer hours are argued to be important drivers of the gender wage gap in the United States. We provide evidence that in couples where the wife's working hours exceed the husba...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...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Unfairness at work: Well-being and quits

We here consider the effect of the level of income that individuals consider to be fair for the job they do, which we take as measure of comparison income, on both subjective well-being and objective future job quitting....Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2018

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The World Happiness Report 2018, ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, and 117 countries by the happiness of their immigrants. Th...Read more...

Journal article

Economics of Education Review:

Smart but unhappy: Independent-school competition and the wellbeing-efficiency trade-off in education

We study whether independent-school competition involves a trade-off between pupil wellbeing and academic performance. To test this hypothesis, we analyse data covering pupils across the OECD, exploiting historical Catho...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early-life correlates of later-life well-being: evidence from the Wisconsin longitudinal study

We here use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to provide one of the first analyses of the distal (early-life) and proximal (later-life) correlates of older-life subjective well-being. Unusually, we have tw...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Happiness at work

Work-life balance is a particularly strong predictor of people’s happiness. High degrees of job satisfaction can hide low levels of engagement at work. Happiness helps to shape job market outcomes, productivity and firm ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Psychology:

Top incomes and human well-being: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll

The share of income held by the top 1 percent in many countries around the world has been rising persistently over the last 30 years. But we continue to know little about the relationship between the rising top income sh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can raising instructional time crowd out student pro-social behaviour? Unintended consequences of a German high school reform

We study whether raising instructional time can crowd out student pro-social behaviour. To this end, we exploit a large educational reform in Germany that has raised weekly instructional hours for high school students by...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: evidence from British cohort data

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average of adulthood. We her...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

War, migration and the origins of the Thai sex industry

This paper analyzes the determinants behind the spatial distribution of the sex industry in Thailand. We relate the development of the sex industry to an early temporary demand shock, i.e., U.S. military presence during ...Read more...

Journal article

PLoS Medicine:

Community health promotion and medical provision for neonatal health - CHAMPION cluster randomised trial in Nagarkurnool district, Telangana (formerly Andhra Pradesh), India

Background: In the mid-2000s, neonatal mortality accounted for almost 40% of deaths of children under 5 years worldwide, and constituted 65% of infant deaths in India. The neonatal mortality rate in Andhra Pradesh was 44...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

Retirement blues

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects instrumental-variable s...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Would you choose to be happy? Tradeoffs between happiness and the other dimensions of life in a large population survey

A large literature documents the determinants of happiness. But is happiness all that people want from life; and if so, what type of happiness matters to them? Or are they willing to sacrifice happiness (however it is de...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The key determinants of happiness and misery

Understanding the key determinants of people?s life satisfaction will suggest policies for how best to reduce misery and promote wellbeing. This paper provides evidence from survey data on USA, Australia, Britain and Ind...Read more...

Journal article

International Review of Economics:

Happiness, income and poverty

There is considerable evidence from a variety of sources to suggest that well-being is a function of relative income. These findings have been used to explain the Easterlin Paradox, whereby a rise in income for all does ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happiness at work

Happiness is typically defined by how people experience and evaluate their lives as a whole. Since the majority of people spend much of their lives at work, it is critically important to gain a solid understanding of the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Teacher quality, test scores and non-cognitive skills: evidence from primary school teachers in the UK

Schooling can produce both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, both of which are important determinants of adult outcomes. Using very rich data from a UK birth cohort study, I estimate teacher value added (VA) models for...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2017

The first World Happiness Report was published in April, 2012, in support of the UN High Level Meeting on happiness and well-being. Since then the world has come a long way. Increasingly, happiness is considered to be th...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management:

Does the presence of wind turbines have negative externalities for people in their surroundings? Evidence from well-being data

Throughout the world, governments foster the deployment of wind power to mitigate negative externalities of conventional electricity generation, notably CO2 emissions. Wind turbines, however, are not free of externalitie...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Superstar houses and the American mortgage frenzy

Clement Bellet shows how visible wealth inequality fuelled the US mortgage boom that preceded the financial crisis....Read more...

CentrePiece article

Origins of happiness

Understanding the key determinants of people’s life satisfaction makes it possible to suggest policies for how best to reduce misery and promote wellbeing. A forthcoming book by Richard Layard and colleagues discusses ev...Read more...

Journal article

Kyklos:

Do More of Those in Misery Suffer from Poverty, Unemployment or Mental Illness?

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life...Read more...

Book

Origins of Happiness

What makes people happy? Why should governments care about people's well-being? How would policy change if well-being were the main objective? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human prio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The paradox of the Joneses: superstar houses and mortgage frenzy in suburban America

Despite a major upscaling of suburban houses over the last decades, house satisfaction has remained steady in the United States. I show that upward comparison in size can explain this paradox, as top housing size mirrore...Read more...

External publication

Measuring wellbeing and cost-effectiveness analysis

The measuring wellbeing series consists of discussion papers and how-to guides. This publication is a discussion paper. Why ignite discussion about measuring wellbeing? In our role as an independent collaborating centre...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Income and Wealth:

Economic Growth Evens Out Happiness: Evidence from Six Surveys

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern gro...Read more...

Journal article

Applied Research in Quality of Life:

Estimating the Mental Health Effects of Social Isolation

It is frequently hypothesized that feelings of social isolation are detrimental for an individual’s mental health, however standard statistical models cannot estimate this effect due to reverse causality between the inde...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

The ‘photo-finish effect’: when third place winners are happier than second

Laura Kudrna, a London School of Economics scholarship PhD candidate, researches the effects of achievement on happiness, particularly focusing on examples of when greater success – be it financial, academic, romantic, o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The host with the most? The effects of the Olympic Games on happiness

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal infer...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Adaptation to poverty in long-run panel data

We consider the link between poverty and subjective wellbeing and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show, first,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Without my medal on my mind: counterfactual thinking and other determinants of athlete emotions

How achievement makes people feel depends upon counterfactual thoughts about what could have been. One body of evidence for this comes from studies of observer ratings of Olympians' happiness, which suggests that categor...Read more...

Journal article

Psychological Science:

Models of Affective Decision Making: How Do Feelings Predict Choice?

Intuitively, how you feel about potential outcomes will determine your decisions. Indeed, an implicit assumption in one of the most influential theories in psychology, prospect theory, is that feelings govern choice. Sur...Read more...

Journal article

Gerontology:

Associations between neighborhood characteristics, well-being and health vary over the life course

Background: Neighborhood characteristics are important determinants of individual health and well-being. For example, characteristics such as noise and pollution affect health directly, while other characteristics affect...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2016

The World Happiness Report 2016 Update, which ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, was released in Rome in advance of UN World Happiness Day, March 20th. The widespread interest in the World Happiness Reports, ...Read more...

Journal article

American Journal of Medical Research:

Why we should spend more on mental health

Mental health problems affect roughly 1 in 5 adults, and 1 in 10 children at any one time. In rich countries they cause roughly 40% of disability, absenteeism and underperformance at work, and cost some 7% of GDP. Under ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Models of affective decision-making: how do feelings predict choice?

Intuitively, how we feel about potential outcomes will determine our decisions. Indeed, one of the most influential theories in psychology, Prospect Theory, implicitly assumes that feelings govern choice. Surprisingly, h...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Misery and mental health

Mental illness is a far bigger source of human misery than poverty or unemployment, according to research by Sarah Flèche and Richard Layard. They argue that we need to move beyond a purely materialistic conception of mi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Unmet aspirations as an explanation for the age U-shape in wellbeing

An emerging economic literature has found evidence that wellbeing follows a U-shape over age. Some theories have assumed that the U-shape is caused by unmet expectations that are felt painfully in midlife but beneficiall...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization:

Can having internal locus of control insure against negative shocks? Psychological evidence from panel data

We investigate whether the intensity of emotional pain following a negative shock is different across the distribution of a person's locus of control - the extent to which individuals believe that their actions can influ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Top incomes and human well-being around the world

The share of income held by the top 1 percent in many countries around the world has been rising persistently over the last 30 years. But we continue to know little about how the rising top income shares affect human wel...Read more...

Journal article

Ecological Economics:

The greener, the happier? The effect of urban land use on residential well-being

We investigate the effect of urban land use on residential well-being in major German cities, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and cross-section data from the European Urban Atlas. We reduce concerns...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The youngest get the pill: ADHD misdiagnosis and the production of education in Germany

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a leading diagnosed health condition among children in many developed countries but the causes underlying these high levels of ADHD remain highly controversial. Recent r...Read more...

Journal article

Annals of economics and statistics:

Childhood Sporting Activities and Adult Labour-Market Outcomes.

We here ask whether childhood sport participation is positively correlated with adult labour-market outcomes. There are many potential channels for this effect, although, as usual, identifying a causal relationship is di...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do people seek to maximize their subjective well-being?

In a new survey we ask respondents, after a standard Subjective Well-Being (SWB) question, if they can think of changes in their lives that would improve their SWB score. If the SWB score is just one argument among other...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Short and long-term effects of unemployment on fertility

Scholars have been examining the relationship between fertility and unemployment for more than a century. Most studies find that fertility falls with unemployment in the short run, but it is not known whether these negat...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Distaste for centralization: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in Switzerland

Do people care about the degree of centralization? This paper examines the effects of local centralization reforms on individuals' well-being using a quasi-natural experiment in Switzerland. The results reveal that centr...Read more...

Journal article

Frontiers in Psychology:

Why more psychological therapy would cost nothing

To tackle the huge problem of mental illness, England has launched a large programme of psychological therapy, which is being watched worldwide. The authors argue that it costs nothing, due to savings on welfare benefits...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early maternal employment and non-cognitive outcomes in early childhood and adolescence: evidence from British birth cohort data

We analyse the relationship between early maternal employment and child emotional and behavioural outcomes in early childhood and adolescence. Using rich data from a cohort of children born in the UK in the early 1990s, ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics:

Are happier people less judgmental of other people's selfish behaviors? Experimental survey evidence from trust and gift exchange games

What determines people's moral judgments of selfish behaviors? Here we study whether people's normative views in trust and gift exchange games, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance, are them...Read more...

Blog

ESRC blog:

Making the world a happier place

Professor Lord Richard Layard directs the Wellbeing Programme at the ESRC Centre for Economic Performance, and has made major contributions on unemployment, inflation, inequality and post-Communist reform. Author of the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Consumption smoothing and the welfare cost of uncertainty

How does income uncertainty affect individual well-being? Combining individual-level panel data from rural Ethiopia with high-resolution meteorological data, we estimate that mean-preserving increases in rainfall variabi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Would you choose to be happy? Tradeoffs between happiness and the other dimensions of life in a large population survey

A large literature documents the correlates and causes of subjective well-being, or happiness. But few studies have investigated whether people choose happiness. Is happiness all that people want from life, or are they w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does worker wellbeing affect workplace performance?

This paper uses linked employer-employee data to investigate the relationship between employees? subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically-significa...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do more of those in misery suffer from poverty, unemployment or mental illness?

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Happiness Studies:

Happy talk: mode of administration effects on subjective well-being

There is increasing interest in subjective well-being (SWB) both in academic and policy circles. As a result, considerable research efforts are now being directed at the validity and reliability of SWB measures. This stu...Read more...

CEP election analysis

A New Priority for Mental Health

Mental illness (especially depression and chronic anxiety) is the biggest single cause of misery in advanced countries. But only one quarter of those who are ill receive treatment. Mental health is crucial for wellbeing ...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2015

Since it was first published in 2012, the World Happiness Report demonstrated that well-being and happiness are critical indicators of a nation's economic and social development, and should be a key aim of policy. This y...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is happiness a predictor of election results?

Is it in politicians? interest to focus policy on subjective well-being (SWB)? Many governments and international organisations have recently begun to measure progress at least partly in terms of the population?s SWB or ...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Mental health and education decisions

Mental health problems have been rising internationally. The link between poor mental health and low educational outcomes is particularly interesting in the case of the UK which has a low international ranking both on me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do you have to win it to fix it? A longitudinal study of lottery winners and their health care demand

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on health care demand in the United Kingdom. This strategy allows us to estimate lottery income elasticities for a range of h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Share capitalism and worker wellbeing

We show that worker wellbeing is not only related to the amount of compensation workers receive but also how they receive it. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been pre-occupied with individual perf...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Vertical transmission of overweight: evidence from English adoptees

We examine the vertical transmission of overweight drawing upon a sample of English children, both adopted and non-adopted, and their families. Our results suggest strong evidence of an intergenerational association of o...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Business cycle blues

People do not psychologically benefit from economic expansions nearly as much as they suffer from recessions, according to research by JanEmmanuel De Neve and colleagues....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Adaptation to poverty in long-run panel data

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show first...Read more...

Journal article

Feature Issue:

What predicts a successful life? A life-course model of well-being

Policy makers who care about well-being need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a mo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic growth evens-out happiness: evidence from six surveys

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern gro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The asymmetric experience of positive and negative economic growth: global evidence using subjective well-being data

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? Using subjective well-being data, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth is experienced. We find that mea...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Policy for better mental health

Treating mental illness should be a top national priority, especially as proven psychological therapies effectively cost nothing. Richard Layard explains how CEP research has led to a new deal for mental health – but muc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early, late or never? When does parental education impact child outcomes?

We study the intergenerational effects of parents? education on their children?s educational outcomes. The endogeneity of parental education is addressed by exploiting the exogenous shift in education levels induced by t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Locus of control and its intergenerational implications for early childhood skill formation

We propose a model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on the early skill formation of their children. This subjective belief is determined in part by locus of control (LOC), i....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Because I'm worth it: a lab-field experiment on the spillover effects of incentives in health

We conduct a controlled lab-field experiment to directly test the short-run spillover effects of one-off financial incentives in health. We consider how incentives affect effort in a physical activity task ? and then how...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wealth shocks and health outcomes: evidence from stock market fluctuations

Do wealth shocks affect the health of the elderly in developed countries? The economic literature is skeptical about such effects which have so far only been found for poor retirees in poor countries. In this paper I sho...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Eliciting taxpayer preferences increases tax compliance

Two experiments show that eliciting taxpayer preferences on government spending?providing taxpayer agency--increases tax compliance. We first create an income and taxation environment in a laboratory setting to test for ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What can life satisfaction data tell us about discrimination against sexual minorities? A structural equation model for Australia and the United Kingdom

Very little is known about how the differential treatment of sexual minorities could influence subjective reports of overall well-being. This paper seeks to fill this gap. Data from two large surveys that provide nationa...Read more...

External publication

Report on wellbeing and public policy

An independent commission chaired by Gus O'Donnell proposes a radical reform of public policy-making, targeted at wellbeing, or life satisfaction, not simply economic growth.Its report, Wellbeing and Policy, commissioned...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Looking ahead: subjective time perception and individual time discounting

Time discounting is at the heart of economic decision-making. We disentangle hyperbolic discounting from subjective time perception using experimental data from incentive-compatible tests to measure time preferences, and...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Money, well-being and loss aversion: does an income loss have a greater effect on well-being than an equivalent income gain?

Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses impact on well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined with relation to decisions...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Childhood sporting activities and adult labour-market outcomes

We here ask whether sports participation at school is positively correlated with adult labour-market outcomes. There are many potential channels for this effect, although, as usual, identifying a causal relationship is d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Upward social mobility, well-being and political preferences: evidence from the BHPS

The paper uses 18 waves of BHPS data to provide evidence of the roles of both own social status and upward mobility relative to one's parents on job and life satisfaction, preferences for redistribution, pro-public secto...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

What predicts a successful life? A life-course model of well-being

If policy-makers care about well-being, they need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Risk and evidence of bias in randomized controlled trials in economics

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) has been a heavily utilized research tool in medicine for over 60 years. Since the early 2000?s, large-scale RCTs have been used in increasingly large numbers in the social sciences ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mental illness and unhappiness

This paper is a contribution to the second World Happiness Report. It makes five main points: 1. Mental health is the biggest single predictor of life-satisfaction. This is so in the UK, Germany and Australia even if men...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2013

The second World Happiness Report, released on Sept 9th 2013, further strengthens the case that well-being should be a critical component of how the world measures its economic and social development....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The objective benefits of subjective well-being

The aim of this paper is to survey the 'hard' evidence on the effects of subjective well-being. In doing so, we complement the evidence on the determinants of well-being by showing that human well-being also affects outc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A general method for valuing non-market goods using wellbeing data: three-stage wellbeing valuation

Subjective wellbeing data is becoming increasingly popular in economics research. The wellbeing valuation approach uses wellbeing data instead of data gleaned from preferences to attach monetary values to non-market good...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are happier people less judgmental of other people's selfish behaviors? Laboratory evidence from trust and gift exchange games

What determines people?s moral judgments of selfish behaviors? Here we study whether people?s normative views in trust and gift exchange games, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance, are them...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unmet aspirations as an explanation for the age U-shape in human wellbeing

A large literature in behavioral and social sciences has found that human wellbeing follows a U-shape over age. Some theories have assumed that the U-shape is caused by unmet expectations that are felt painfully in midli...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Winning big but feeling no better? The effect of lottery prizes on physical and mental health

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking)...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Enhancing recovery rates: lessons from year one of the English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme

Background: The English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative aims to make evidence-based psychological therapies for depression and anxiety disorder more widely available in the National Health S...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Molecular genetics and subjective well-being

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a major topic of research across the social sciences. Twin and family studies have found that genetic factors may account for as much as 30-40% of the variance in SWB. Here, we study geneti...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The long reach of childhood bullying

Does the fear of being bullied in childhood affect people's resilience to adverse life events they may face in adulthood? The author investigates whether the 'scarring' effects are particularly damaging to individuals wh...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Are you happy while you work?

Happiness surveys typically ask people to say how they feel about their life experiences in retrospect, but smartphone technology makes it possible to collect responses on wellbeing 'in the moment'. The authors use this ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The marginal income effect of education on happiness: estimating the direct and indirect effects of compulsory schooling on well-being in Australia

Many economists and educators favour public support for education on the premise that education improves the overall well-being of citizens. However, little is known about the causal pathways through which education shap...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mental health: the new frontier for labour economics

This lecture argues that mental health is a major factor of production. It is the biggest single influence on life satisfaction, with mental health eight years earlier a more powerful explanatory factor than current inco...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Smoking, Income and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Smoking Bans

This paper investigates the effects of local smoking bans on different outcomes using county and time variation over the last 20 years in the US. First, I find no evidence that local smoking bans in bars, restaurants and...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Better Rail Access Improve Homeowners’ Happiness?: Evidence Based on Micro Surveys in Beijing

Development of urban transport infrastructures is a key policy focus---particularly in countries like China which have experienced fast urbanisation over the past decade. While existing studies provide marginal values fo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US

This paper analyses how neighbors' income affect agents' well-being using unprecedented data from the BRFSS and the City of Somerville. We conduct a multi-scale approach at the county, ZIP code and street-levels and find...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Moving Up and Sliding Down: An Empirical Assessment of the Effect of Social Mobility on Subjective Wellbeing

Many people remain in the same income group as their parents and this is a cause of much discussion and some concern. In this work, we examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using the B...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are You Happy While You Work?

Recent work in psychology and economics has investigated ways in which individuals experience their lives. This literature includes influences on individuals’ momentary happiness. We contribute to this literature using a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Estimating the Influence of Life Satisfaction and Positive Affect on Later Income Using Sibling Fixed-Effects

The question of whether there is a connection between income and psychological well-being is a long-studied issue across the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences. Much research has found that richer people tend...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Enduring Impact of Childhood Experience on Mental Health: Evidence Using Instrumented Co-Twin Data

The question of whether there is a lasting effect of childhood experience on mental health has eluded causal measurement. We draw upon identical twin data and econometric instrumentation to provide an unbiased answer. We...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Resilience to Economic Shocks and the Long Reach of Childhood Bullying

This paper investigates whether people?s ability to withstand and adapt to one of the most important economic shocks ? job loss ? is determined early on in childhood. Using nationally representative longitudinal data tha...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Mental illness and the NHS

Richard Layard and colleagues reveal the shocking scale of mental illness in Britain - and how little the NHS does about it....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Transferable Scars: A Longitudinal Evidence of Psychological Impact of Past Parental Unemployment on Adolescents in the United Kingdom

Using a longitudinal data of British youths, this paper explores the consequences of past parental unemployment on the current happiness and self-esteem of the children. We find that a past unemployment spell of the fath...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Cautionary Note on Using Industry Affiliation to Predict Income

Many literatures investigate the causal impact of income on economic outcomes, for example in the context of intergenerational transmission or well-being and health. Some studies have proposed to use employer wage differ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Hooray for GDP!

Should raising the growth rate of GDP per capita be a policy goal of governments in general, and of the British government in particular? Many people would say no, for the following reasons: 1) GDP is hopelessly flawed a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happy Talk: mode of administration effects on subjective well-being

Research on the measurement of subjective well-being (SWB) has escalated in recent years. This study contributes to the literature by examining how SWB reports differ by mode of survey administration. Using data from the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Not all Incentives Wash out the Warm Glow: The Case of Blood Donation Revisited

The issue of the nature of the altruism inherent in blood donation and the perverse effects of financial rewards for blood and/or organ donation has been recently revisited in the economic literature with limited consens...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Do People Pay for Useless Advice?

We investigated experimentally whether people can be induced to believe in a non-existent expert, and subsequently pay for what can only be described as transparently useless advice about future chance events. Consistent...Read more...

CEP report

How mental illness loses out in the NHS a report by the Centre for Economic Performance's Mental Health Policy Group

Mental illness accounts for a massive share of the total burden of disease. Even when we include the burden of premature death mental illness accounts for 23% of the total burden of disease. Yet, despite the existence of...Read more...

External publication

World Happiness Report 2012

The 2012 World Happiness Report, published by the Earth Institute and co-edited by the institute’s director, Jeffrey Sachs, reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteri...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Mental Health and Education Decisions

Mental health problems - and depression in particular - have been rising internationally. The link between poor mental health and poor educational outcomes is particularly interesting in the case of the UK which has a lo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Genes, Economics and Happiness

A major finding from research into the sources of subjective well-being is that individuals exhibit a “baseline” level of happiness. We explore the influence of genetic variation by employing a twin design and genetic as...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Happiness as a Driver of Risk-Avoiding Behavior

Most governments try to discourage their citizens from taking extreme risks with their health and lives. Yet, for reasons not understood, many people continue to do so. We suggest a new approach to this longstanding ques...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Crime and mental wellbeing

Francesca Cornaglia and Andrew Leigh measure the impact of crime - and media reporting of crime - on the mental wellbeing of both victims and non-victims...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Wellbeing in the workplace: the impact of modern management

How people feel about their jobs is an important part of their overall happiness yet until now, few studies have explored the links between employees' wellbeing and their working environment. Alex Bryson and colleagues a...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Big ideas: Wellbeing and public policy

Richard Layard outlines the development of CEP research on what makes people happy and how society might best be organised to promote happiness....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Provision of Relative Performance Feedback Information: An Experimental Analysis of Performance and Happiness

This paper studies the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on individuals’ performance and affective response, under both piece-rate and flat-rate incentives. In a laboratory setup, agents perfo...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics:

Genes, economics, and happiness

We explore the influence of genetic variation on subjective well-being by employing a twin design and genetic association study. In a nationally representative twin sample, we first show that ~33% of the variation in lif...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Anorexia, Body Image and Peer Effects: Evidence from a Sample of European Women

Excessive preoccupation with self-image (or identity) is regarded as a factor contributing to the proliferation of food disorders, especially among young women. This paper models how self-image and peer effects influence...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does High Involvement Management Improve Worker Wellbeing?

Employees exposed to high involvement management (HIM) practices have higher subjective wellbeing, fewer accidents but more short absence spells than “like” employees not exposed to HIM. These results are robust to exten...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Wishful Thinking

An experiment tested whether and in what circumstances people are more likely to believe an event simply because it makes them better off. Subjects observed a financial asset's historical price chart, and received both a...Read more...

Journal article

International Review of Psychiatry:

Implementing NICE guidelines for the psychological treatment of depression and anxiety disorders: The IAPT experience

The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme is a large-scale initiative that aims to greatly increase the availability of NICE recommended psychological treatment for depression and anxiety disorders...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Model for the Delivery of Evidence-Based PSHE (Personal Wellbeing) in Secondary Schools

Personal Social Health and Economic (PSHE) education is a non-statutory school subject designed to facilitate the delivery of a number of key competencies relevant to health, safety and wellbeing. As well as contributing...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Step towards Valuing Utility the Marginal and Cardinal Way

Income has a direct impact on our utility as well as an indirect impact through the goods, services and life events it allows us to purchase. The indirect effect of income is not properly accounted for in existing resear...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Money and Happiness: Evidence from the Industry Wage Structure

There is a well-established positive correlation between life-satisfaction measures and income in individual level cross-sectional data. This paper attempts to provide some evidence on whether this correlation reflects c...Read more...

Book

Happiness
Lessons from a New Science

In this new edition of his landmark book, Richard Layard shows that there is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Crime and Mental Wellbeing

Most estimates of the cost of crime focus on victims. Yet it is plausible that an even larger cost of crime occurs via its indirect impact on the mental wellbeing of non-victims. To test how crime affects individuals’ me...Read more...

CEP report

Measuring subjective wellbeing for public policy: recommendations on measures

The measurement of wellbeing is central to public policy. There are three uses for any measure: 1) monitoring progress; 2) informing policy design; and 3) policy appraisal. There has been increasing interest in the UK an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Priors and Desires

This paper offers a simple but powerful model of wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, and related biases. Choices maximize subjective expected utility, but beliefs depend on the decision maker's interests as well as o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Higher Wages Come at a Price?

Using linked employer-employee data for Britain we find job satisfaction and job anxiety are negatively correlated but higher wages are associated with higher job satisfaction and higher job anxiety. However, we observe ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Map of Mental Health

This paper provides a comprehensive picture of mental health services in England, including staffing and expenditure, and the number of people in need and the number treated. Historically, this information has been split...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

How Does Innovation Affect Worker Well-being?

We explore the effects of management innovations on worker well-being using private sector linked employer-employee data for Britain. We find management innovations are associated with lower worker well-being and lower j...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Life satisfaction and relative income: perceptions and evidence

Using a unique dataset we study both the actual and self-perceived relationship between subjective well-being and income comparisons against a wide range of potential comparison groups, enabling us to investigate a broad...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does relative income matter? Are the critics right?

Do other peoples’ incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has ...Read more...

Book

A Good Childhood
Searching for Values in a Competitive Age

Every day the newspapers lament the problems facing our children - broken homes, pressures to eat and drink, the stress of exams. The same issues are discussed in every pub and at every dinner party. But is life really...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

School Quality, Child Wellbeing and Parents Satisfaction

Researchers in economics of education usually assume that parents choose schools for their high academic performance, with some support from revealed preference evidence based on local house prices. However, anecdotal ev...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Improving Access to Psychological Therapy: Initial Evaluation of the Two Demonstration Sites

The Government's Improving Access to Psychological Therapy (IAPT) programme aims to implement NICE Guidance for people with depression and anxiety disorders. In the first phase of the programme, two demonstration sites w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Comparing Willingness-to-Pay and Subjective Well-Being in the Context of Non-Market Goods

In order to value non-market goods, economists estimate individuals? willingness to pay (WTP) for these goods using revealed or stated preference methods. We compare these conventional approaches with subjective well-bei...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

The marginal utility of income

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) me...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals, after life and labour market events, tend to return to some baseline level of well-being? Although the strongest life satisfaction...Read more...

Journal article

National Institute Economic Review:

Cost-benefit analysis of psychological therapy

At present six million people are suffering from clinical depression or anxiety disorders, but only a quarter of them are in treatment. NICE Guidelines prescribe the offer of evidence-based psychological therapy, but the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Psychological Therapy

At present six million people are suffering from clinical depression or anxiety disorders, but only a quarter of them are in treatment. NICE Guidelines prescribe the offer of evidence-based psychological therapy, but the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Marginal Utility of Income

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) me...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Sheepskin or Prozac: The Causal Effect of Education on Mental Health

Mental illness is associated with large costs to individuals and society. Education improves various health outcomes but little work has been done on mental illness. To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of educatio...Read more...

CEP report

The Depression Report: A New Deal for Depression and Anxiety Disorders

Read more...

Journal article

Economic Journal:

Happiness and public policy: a challenge to the profession

The theory behind public economics needs radical reform. It fails to explain the recent history of human welfare and it ignores some of the key findings of modern psychology. Indeed these two failings are intimately link...Read more...