Nominal or Real? The Impact of Regional Price Levels on Satisfaction with Life

According to economic theory, real income, i.e., nominal income adjusted for purchasing power, should be the relevant source of life satisfaction. Previous work, however, has only studied the impact of inflation adjusted nominal income and not taken into account regional differences in purchasing power. Therefore, we use a novel data set to study how regional price levels affect satisfaction with life. The data set comprises about 7 million data points that are used to construct a price level for each of the 428 administrative districts in Germany. We estimate pooled OLS and ordered probit models that include a comprehensive set of individual level, time-varying and time-invariant control variables as well as control variables that capture district heterogeneity other than the price level. Our results show that higher price levels significantly reduce life satisfaction. Furthermore, we find that a higher price level tends to induce a larger loss in life satisfaction than a corresponding decrease in nominal income. A formal test of neutrality of money, however, does not reject neutrality of money. Our results provide an argument in favor of regional indexation of government transfer payments such as social welfare benefits

Does Daily Sunshine make you Happy? Subjective Measures of Well-being and the Weather

This paper examines to what extent individual measures of well-being are correlated with daily weather patterns in the United Kingdom. Merging daily weather data with data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) allows us to test whether measures of well-being are correlated with temperature, sunshine, rainfall and wind speed. We are able to make a strong case for causality due to ‘randomness’ of weather in addition to using regression methods that eliminate time-invariant individual level heterogeneity. Results suggest that some weather parameters (such as sunshine) are correlated with some measures of well-being (job satisfaction); however, in general the effect of weather on subjective measures of well-being is very small

The relationship between well-being and commuting revisited: does the choice of methodology matter?

This paper provides an assessment of a range of alternative estimators for fixed-effects ordered models in the context of estimating the relationship between subjective well-being and commuting behaviour. In contrast to previous papers in the literature we find no evidence that longer commutes are associated with lower levels of subjective well-being, in general. From a methodological point of view our results support earlier findings that linear and ordered fixed-effects models of life satisfaction give similar results. However, we argue that ordered models are more appropriate as they are theoretically preferable, straightforward to implement and lead to easily interpretable results

Unhappiness and Job Finding

It is puzzling that people feel unhappy when they become unemployed, while simultaneously active labour market policies are needed to bring them back to work. We investigate this using GSOEP data. We find that nearly half of the unemployed do not experience a drop in happiness, which might explain why activation is sometimes needed. Furthermore, even though unhappy unemployed search more actively for a job, it does not speed up their job finding. Apparently, there is no link between unhappiness and job finding rate. Hence there is no contradiction between the unemployed being unhappy and the need for activation policies

Direct evidence on income comparisons and their welfare effects

This paper provides direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect on subjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types of benchmarks. Internal comparisons to one's own past living standard outweigh any other comparison benchmarks. Local comparisons (to one's parents, former colleagues or high school mates) are more powerful than self-ranking in the social ladder. The impact of comparisons is asymmetric: under-performing one's benchmark always has a greater welfare effect than out-performing it (in absolute value). Comparisons which reduce satisfaction also increase the demand for income redistribution, but there, the relative impact of subjective ranking is preponderant.Exploitant une enquête conduite en 2006 par la BERD dans 28 pays en transition (LITS), cet article tente de mettre en évidence l'importance des comparaisons de revenu et leur effet sur le bien-être subjectif des agents. Il évalue également le poids relatif de différentes aunes de comparaison. Il apparaît que les comparaisons dans le temps sont plus importantes que les comparaisons statiques. Les catégories de références internes sont plus importantes que les groupes de référence externes. Enfin, les comparaisons à des groupes précis ont davantage d'impact que le rang subjectif d'un individu au sein de la hiérarchie sociale. L'effet le plus remarquable en terme de bien-être provient de la détérioration du niveau de vie des enquêtés par rapport au passé, ainsi que du fait de connaître une évolution moins favorable que d'anciens camarades de classes ou d'anciens collègues. Une interprétation possible est que les comparaisons sont d'autant plus puissantes qu'elles sont interprétées par les agents en termes d'occasions saisies ou manquées

Money, sex and happiness : an empirical study

The links between income, sexual behavior and reported happiness are studied using recent data on a sample of 16,000 adult Americans. The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations. Higher income does not buy more sex or more sexual partners. Married people have more sex than those who are single, divorced, widowed or separated. The happiness‐maximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is calculated to be 1. Highly educated females tend to have fewer sexual partners. Homosexuality has no statistically significant effect on happiness

Cosmoglobe DR1. III. First full-sky model of polarized synchrotron emission from all WMAP and Planck LFI data

We present the first model of full-sky polarized synchrotron emission that is derived from all WMAP and Planck LFI frequency maps. The basis of this analysis is the set of end-to-end reprocessed Cosmoglobe Data Release 1 sky maps presented in a companion paper, which have significantly lower instrumental systematics than the legacy products from each experiment. We find that the resulting polarized synchrotron amplitude map has an average noise rms of $3.2\,\mathrm{\mu K}$ at 30 GHz and $2^{\circ}$ FWHM, which is 30% lower than the recently released BeyondPlanck model that included only LFI+WMAP Ka-V data, and 29% lower than the WMAP K-band map alone. The mean $B$-to-$E$ power spectrum ratio is $0.40\pm0.02$, with amplitudes consistent with those measured previously by Planck and QUIJOTE. Assuming a power law model for the synchrotron spectral energy distribution, and using the $T$--$T$ plot method, we find a full-sky inverse noise-variance weighted mean of $\beta_{\mathrm{s}}=-3.07\pm0.07$ between Cosmoglobe DR1 K-band and 30 GHz, in good agreement with previous estimates. In summary, the novel Cosmoglobe DR1 synchrotron model is both more sensitive and systematically cleaner than similar previous models, and it has a more complete error description that is defined by a set of Monte Carlo posterior samples. We believe that these products are preferable over previous Planck and WMAP products for all synchrotron-related scientific applications, including simulation, forecasting and component separation.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures, submitted to A&

Cosmoglobe: Towards end-to-end CMB cosmological parameter estimation without likelihood approximations

We implement support for a cosmological parameter estimation algorithm as proposed by Racine et al. (2016) in Commander, and quantify its computational efficiency and cost. For a semi-realistic simulation similar to Planck LFI 70 GHz, we find that the computational cost of producing one single sample is about 60 CPU-hours and that the typical Markov chain correlation length is $\sim$100 samples. The net effective cost per independent sample is $\sim$6 000 CPU-hours, in comparison with all low-level processing costs of 812 CPU-hours for Planck LFI and WMAP in Cosmoglobe Data Release 1. Thus, although technically possible to run already in its current state, future work should aim to reduce the effective cost per independent sample by at least one order of magnitude to avoid excessive runtimes, for instance through multi-grid preconditioners and/or derivative-based Markov chain sampling schemes. This work demonstrates the computational feasibility of true Bayesian cosmological parameter estimation with end-to-end error propagation for high-precision CMB experiments without likelihood approximations, but it also highlights the need for additional optimizations before it is ready for full production-level analysis.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to A&