The mystery of the U-shaped relationship between happiness and age.

In this paper we address the puzzle of the relation between age and happiness. Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. In this paper we replicate the U-shape for the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP), and we investigate several possible explanations for it.Happiness methodology, unobservables, latent variable

Expert panel: People from small, socially cohesive countries are happier

Among the world's rich countries, those that are smaller and more socially cohesive tend to have happier populations on average. That is the consensus finding of a survey of leading researchers on wellbeing from around the world. But opinion is divided among the experts on whether the break-up of large, diverse countries into smaller, less diverse ones can be expected to ..

School indiscipline and crime

This paper studies the impact of compulsory schooling on violent behaviour and victimization in school using individual-level administrative data matching education and criminal records from Queensland (Australia). Exploiting a legislative increase in the minimum dropout age in 2006, this study defines a series of regression-discontinuity specifications to show that compulsory schooling reduces crime but increases violent behaviour in school. While police records show that property and drugs offences decrease, education records indicate that violence and victimization in school increase. Thus, prior studies that fail to consider in-school behaviour may over-estimate the short-run crime-reducing impact of compulsory education

Gender crime convergence over twenty years

Men have typically been responsible for the majority of criminal activity and dominate prison populations around the globe. The twentieth century witnessed significant male-female convergence in a myriad of positive dimensions including human capital acquisition, labour force participation and wages. This has prompted the question, to what extent are women ‘looking more like men’? In this paper we examine whether similar forces are at play in the context of criminality. We study the pattern of gender convergence in crime using rich administrative data on the population of young people in Queensland, Australia. We present evidence of significant narrowing of the gender gap in criminal activity over the course of the last twenty years. Crime convergence occurs for broad aggregates of both property and violent crime, as well as for almost all sub-component categories. Convergence occurs largely because crime has fallen significantly for men, combined with much less of a downward trend for women. Results are supported by aggregate analysis of rates of offending in police force districts matched to census data by gender between 2001 and 2016

The relationship between obesity and self-esteem: longitudinal evidence from Australian adults

We examine whether low self-esteem increases the risk of obesity in a panel of Australian adults. To address the problem of endogeneity, we look at weight changes following exogenous shocks to self-esteem, such as the unexpected death of friends and family members. We find that negative shocks adversely affect self-esteem in turn leading to large increases in weight via increased food consumption and reduced exercise. The effects of the negative shocks were found to be larger for the lower educated and females

Determinants of adolescent happiness in Australia

The question looked at in this paper is the change in happiness levels amongst young adolescents. We develop child-specific scales to measure the effect of personality and life satisfaction domains on childhood happiness. With an internet-based survey, we collect unique data from 389 Australian children aged between 9 and 14. Adding to previous findings that Australian happiness levels decline between the age of 15 and 23 by almost 0.7 on a tenpoint scale, we find an even steeper happiness decline before the age of 14. Using a decomposition method, we find that the children’s ‘school’ and ‘interaction with friends’ domains explain over 40% of the decline in childhood happiness. The decline in childhood happiness is steepest when the children transition from the first to second year in high school. Unlike adults, perceived relative wealth has no relation to childhood happiness. As expected, extraverted children are happier, but unexpectedly, so are conscientious children

Gender crime convergence over twenty years: evidence from Australia

Historically men have been responsible for the majority of criminal activity and dominate prison populations around the globe. The twentieth century witnessed significant male–female convergence in a myriad of positive dimensions including human capital acquisition, labour force participation and wages. This has prompted the question, to what extent are women ‘looking more like men’? In this paper we examine whether similar forces are at play in the context of criminality. We study the pattern of gender convergence in crime using rich administrative data on the population of young people in Queensland, Australia. The evidence points to a significant narrowing of the gender gap in criminal activity over the course of the last twenty years. Crime convergence occurs for broad aggregates of both property and violent crime, as well as for almost all sub-component categories. Convergence occurs largely because crime has fallen significantly for men, combined with no downward trend for women. This is confirmed by aggregate analysis of rates of offending in police force districts matched to Census data by gender between 2001 and 201

Do changes in the lives of our peers make us happy?

In this paper, we seek to explain the changes in aggregate happiness over the life-course. The advantage of looking at the aggregate level of happiness is that it solves the problems of missing peer effects and measurement error that plague models of individual level happiness, though the disadvantage is a dramatic loss of degrees of freedom. We use panel data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics for Australia (HILDA), which allows us to construct an index of the severity of life changes for each age. This singlevariable Stress Index is able to explain over 80% of the variation in happiness over time. Unexpectedly, aggregate ‘positive stress’ (such as marriage rates by age or levels of job promotion) have greater negative effects on aggregate life satisfaction than negative stress (such as negative financial events or deaths of spouses), which we interpret as a strong indication that what is deemed a positive event by the person involved is a highly negative event for his or her peers. We find some evidence that extraverted individuals get affected less negatively by stress. The happiness maximising policy is to reduce changes over the life cycle to the bare minimum needed to sustain a dynamic economy while maximising the happiness of society

Larrikin youth: new evidence on crime and schooling

This paper reports new evidence on the causal link between education and male youth crime using individual level state-wide administrative data for Queensland, Australia. Enactment of the Earning or Learning education reform of 2006, with a mandatory increase in minimum school leaving age, is used to identify a causal impact of schooling on male youth crime. The richness of the matched (across agency) individual level panel data enables the analysis to shed significant light on the extent to which the causal impact reflects incapacitation, or whether more schooling acts to reduce crime after youths have left compulsory schooling. The empirical analysis uncovers a significant incapacitation effect, as remaining in school for longer reduces crime whilst in school, but also a sizeable crime reducing impact of education for young men in their late teens and early twenties. We also carry out analysis by major crime type and differentiate between single and multiple offending behaviour. Crime reduction effects are concentrated in property crime and single crime incidence, rather than altering the behaviour of the recalcitrant persistent offende

Age in cohort, school indiscipline and crime: regression-discontinuity estimates for Queensland

Youth crime involves millions of people each year, imposing extensive costs on society. This paper examines the effect of school starting age on in-school disciplinary sanctions and youth crime. Using administrative data matching education and criminal records for Queensland State secondary school students, the paper exploits school-entry administrative rules to define a regression discontinuity design. Younger pupils in cohort appear to receive more disciplinary sanctions during secondary school and to commit more crime after secondary school. A recent school-leaving age reform is also exploited to show that this crime-age profile is consistent with an incapacitation effect of school on crime