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Americans are spending less time with friends, nights out are getting more expensive and even major sporting events are becoming harder to afford. Stephanie Flanders speaks with Bloomberg reporter Ben Steverman and econo...Read more...
Richard Layard
16 July 2026
Optimal public policy requires a social welfare function defined over individual utilities. While there is substantial research on income-based social welfare functions, no published study has directly elicited public pr...Read more...
Richard Layard and Ekaterina Oparina
3 June 2026
Most people consider parks important for their quality of life, yet systematic causal evidence is missing. We exploit exogenous variations in their use values to estimate causal effects. Using a representative household ...Read more...
Jan Goebel, Christian Krekel and Katrin Rehdanz
1 May 2026
Although social connections are important drivers of wellbeing, and sharing meals is a nearly universal practice, the relationship between sharing meals and wellbeing remains underexplored. In Study 1, using novel data f...Read more...
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Andrew Dugan, Micah Kaats and Alberto Prati
22 April 2026
In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. Many people blame social media for this fall in happiness, but does t...Read more...
Lara Aknin, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, John Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D. Sachs and Shun Wang
19 March 2026
What are the economics of happiness? How is happiness measured? Are we failing the next generation by not ensuring their wellbeing? John Tusa speaks to Lord Richard Layard about a lifetime dedicated to the research of s...Read more...
9 March 2026
The relationship between economic growth and happiness is not as straightforward as it first appears. While higher income is associated with greater wellbeing, other factors like healthcare and friendship are important t...Read more...
Andrew E. Clark, Richard Layard and Ekaterina Oparina
17 November 2025
Using wellbeing data to assess benefits for residents....Read more...
Christian Krekel
21 October 2025
Some argue that school is a means to an end, and time spent in lessons may be unpleasant, but it helps these children in the future. The question is 'to what end'. Are school years something which have to be tolerated i...Read more...
Sara MacLennan
13 October 2025
It is well known that unemployment leaves scars after re-employment, but does this scarring effect persist even after retirement? We analyse European data on retirees from the SHARE panel, and show that the wellbeing of ...Read more...
Andrew E. Clark and Anthony Lepinteur
18 August 2025
Parks can be much-loved oases within a city, but quite how important they are when compared to other amenities is tricky to measure. Christian Krekel shows how wellbeing data can be used to put a monetary figure on the v...Read more...
10 July 2025
Fifty years ago, Richard Easterlin asked a fundamental question: does getting richer make us happier? His work gave rise to the Easterlin paradox: while wealthier individuals tend to be happier than poorer people, as cou...Read more...
25 June 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...
20 March 2025
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...
Remy Bellaunay, Christian Krekel and Alberto Prati
30 August 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...
Edited by Lara Aknin, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, John Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D. Sachs and Shun Wang
20 March 2024
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...
Joan Costa-Font, Sarah Fleche and Ricardo Pagan
10 February 2024
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...
Jazzy Jasiulek, Daniel Jolles, Grace Lordan and Nikita
20 December 2023
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...
21 November 2023
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...
Christian Krekel and George MacKerron
20 July 2023
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...
Alberto Prati
19 July 2023
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...
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve
10 July 2023
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...
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Richard Layard
20 June 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...
20 March 2023
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...
21 February 2023
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...
1 December 2022
