A simple statistical method for measuring how life events affect happiness

Background Life events—like illness, marriage, or unemployment—have important effects on people. But there is no accepted way to measure the different sizes of these events upon human happiness and psychological health. By using happiness regression equations, economists have recently developed a method. Methods We estimate happiness regressions using large random samples of individuals. The relative coefficients of income and life events on happiness allow us to calculate a monetary ‘compensating amount’ for each kind of life event. Results The paper calculates the impact of different life events upon human well-being. Getting married, for instance, is calculated to bring each year the same amount of happiness, on average, as having an extra £70 000 of income per annum. The psychological costs of losing a job greatly exceed those from the pure drop in income. Health is hugely important to happiness. Widowhood brings a degree of unhappiness that would take, on average, an extra £170 000 per annum to offset. Well-being regressions also allow us to assess one of the oldest conjectures in social science—that well-being depends not just on absolute things but inherently on comparisons with other people. We find evidence for comparison effects. Conclusion We believe that the new statistical method has many applications. In principle, it can be used to value any kind of event in life

State Estimates of Employment Rates for Persons with Disabilities: Report Summary

Statistics on the states’ employment rates for persons with disabilities relative to their non-disabled peers may be of assistance to providers of employment services for persons with disabilities. Such information can help service providers, policy makers, and disability advocacy leaders to assess whether the employment rate of people with disabilities is improving over time, given policy, regulatory, and service intervention strategies. A recent report from the Cornell University Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (RRTC) for Economic Research on Employment Policy for Persons with Disabilities uses data from the March Current Population Survey to estimate employment rates for persons with and without a disability in the non-institutionalized working-age (aged 25 through 61) civilian population in the United States, and for each state and the District of Columbia for the years 1980 through 1998. The employment rate of persons with a disability relative to that of persons without disabilities are found to vary greatly across states. Over the last 20 years the relative employment rate of those with a disability dramatically declined overall and in most states

Economics of Disability Research Report #3: Estimates of Median Household Size-Adjusted Income for Persons with Disabilities in the United States by State, 1980 through 1998

This report uses data from the March Current Population Survey to estimate median household size-adjusted income for persons with and without a disability in the non-institutionalized working-age (aged 25 through 61) civilian population in the United States, and for each state and the District of Columbia for the years 1980 through 1998. The median household size-adjusted income of persons with a disability relative to those of persons without a disability varies greatly across states. Since 1980, however, the growth in the median household size-adjusted income of those with a disability has fallen below that of the rest of the working population overall and in the vast majority of states

Searches for Compositeness at the Tevatron

Quark-quark and quark-lepton searches for compositenss at the Fermilab Tevatron are summarized. These are of the contact-interaction variety where sqrt(s-hat) < the hypothesized mass scales, Lambda. Tevatron experiments limit a variety of compositeness phenomena in the range from 1.9 to 8.3 TeV. These limits result from measurements of: the Ht spectrum (D0), dijet mass (D0), dijet angular distribution (CDF, D0), drell-yan production (CDF, D0), and the Neutral Current to Charged Current ratio (CCFR/NuTeV).Comment: Presented at VIIIth RENCONTRES DE BLOIS, with recent updates added. 7 Figure