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 influence future outcomes. Using panel data from Australia, we show that individuals with strong internal locus of control are psychologically insured against own and others’ serious illness or injury, close family member detained in jail, becoming a victim of property crime and death of a close friend, but not against the majority of other life events. The buffering effects vary across gender. Our findings thus add to the existing literature on the benefits of internal locus of control

As the richest get richer, everyone else gets less happy

People's negative emotions rise along with the wealth of the top 1%, write Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Nick Powdthave

Workers are happier with less hierarchy

Workers’ satisfaction with their job is, on average, higher in a flatter organisation than in a hierarchical organisation. That is the consensus finding of a survey of leading researchers on wellbeing from around the world on the impact of different organisational structures on workers’ wellbeing

Gender norms and relative working hours : why do women suffer more than men from working longer hours than their partner?

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 husband's, the wife reports lower life satisfaction. By contrast, there is no effect on the husband's satisfaction. The results still hold when controlling for relative income. We argue that these patterns are best explained by perceived fairness of the division of household labor, which induces an aversion to a situation where the wife works more at home and on the labor market

Essay on the use of subjective well-being data in economic analysis : an empirical study using developed and developing countries data

This thesis studies the determinants of subjective well-being, with the main focus on the data relating to developing countries. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 use new South African integrated household data to study the determinants of perceived quality of life at the cross-section. The fifth chapter compares the cross-sectional and over time structures of subjective economic well-being for Indonesia, whilst the sixth chapter uses reported well-being data from the British household panel survey to test an 'old' economic hypothesis in a new way. Chapter 2 tests whether the determinants of subjective well-being are the same when comparing poor and rich nations. Using South Africa as a case study, we find from the full sample analysis that in most comparable cases, the coefficient signs of the usual socio-economic factors in the life satisfaction regression equations for South Africa in 1993 are typically similar to that which would have been expected from data in the more-developed countries. However, our subpopulation regressions reveal very distinct life satisfaction patterns by race and region prior to the end of apartheid in South Africa. Chapter 3 analyses the labour market phenomenon in South Africa. We test whether unemployment hurts less in terms of life satisfaction when there is more of it around. After controlling for the relevant socio-economic factors, we find the unemployed's well-being to be significantly and positively correlated with the levels of others' unemployment in the region. Using the South African data set of 1997, the fourth chapter explores the contemporaneous relationship between measures of criminal victimization and reported well-being. We find crime victims to report significantly lower well-being than the non-victims, ceteris paribus. Reported life satisfaction is lower for nonvictimized respondents currently living in higher crime areas. However, we find some evidence that criminal victimization hurts less in areas of higher crime rates. Chapter 5 examines the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between objective and subjective economic ladder for Indonesia. It finds that individuals' perceptions of economic rank in the economy are more dependent on his or her socio-economic characteristics (i.e. health, education, marital status), as well as attitudes towards future economic ladder, than the current spending behaviour would normally reveal. The correlation between objective and subjective economic ladder is also weakened considerably when an individual's inborn predispositions are controlled for in the regression. Chapter 6 tests whether one's partner's happiness increases one's own happiness in a marriage. After using "residual" self-rated health to provide an instrument for the partner's life satisfaction and allowing controls on individual fixed-effects, we find strong evidence of an interdependent relationship in the reported life satisfaction between married partners, which is not present for those whom are merely Cohabiting

The big factors affecting life satisfaction are all non-economic

What distinguishes ‘Les Misérables’ from the rest is neither poverty nor unemployment, but mental illness, write Andrew Clark, Sarah Fleche, Richard Layard, Nattavudh (Nick) Powdthavee and George War

Boss competence and worker well-being

Nearly all workers have a supervisor or “boss.” Yet little is known about how bosses influence the quality of employees’ lives. This study offers new evidence. First, the authors find that a boss’s technical competence is the single strongest predictor of a worker’s job satisfaction. Second, they demonstrate using longitudinal data, after controlling for fixed-effects, that even if a worker stays in the same job and workplace, a rise in the competence of a supervisor is associated with an improvement in the worker’s well-being. Third, the authors report a variety of robustness checks, including tentative instrumental variable results. These findings, which draw on U.S. and British data, contribute to an emerging literature on the role of “expert leaders” in organizations

Lower-rated publications do lower academics’ judgments of publication lists : evidence from a survey experiment of economists

Publications in leading journals are widely known to have a positive impact on economists’ judgments of the value of authors’ contributions and professional reputations. While conjectures that publications in lower-rated journals likely have a negative impact on such judgments are common, there have been virtually no direct tests of their validity. Our intent is to provide results from such a test, one that involved asking economists from 44 universities throughout the world to rate either a publication list with only higher-rated journals or a list with all of these but with additional publications in lower-rated journals. Our primary finding was that, holding other things constant, adding publications in lower-rated journals to what is typically considered a good publication record does have a significant negative impact on economists’ judgments of the value of the author’s contribution. Most implications of this bias suggest negative impacts on social welfare

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 shares and human wellbeing. Using data from 24 countries and years ranging from 2005 to 2013 in the Gallup World Poll and the World Income Database, this study examines the relationship between top income share and different dimensions of subjective wellbeing. The results are mixed, with the negative relationship between top income shares and average life ladder being driven largely by the European sub-sample. For the European countries, we also document evidence that top income is statistically significantly associated with lower average enjoyment and being well-rested yesterday, and higher average stress and sadness yesterday. Overall, our findings suggest that, at least for individuals in Europe, an economic policy that increases national incomes may have significant crowding-out effect on aggregate evaluative wellbeing if it only increases the share of income at the very top of income distribution. More generally, our results highlight the complex relationships between income inequality and subjective wellbeing across different countries

Gender Norms, Fairness, and Relative Labor Supply 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 satisfaction from working more hours than their female partners. An analysis of possible mechanisms shows that in couples where the woman works more hours than the man, women do not spend significantly less time doing household chores. Women with egalitarian ideologies are likely to perceive this unequal division of labour as unfair, ultimately reducing their life satisfaction