This paper shows that the partisan composition of government is strongly related to the well-being of citizens, measured by the reported level of life satisfaction and suicide rates in industrial countries. Our analysis, using survey data of 14 nations between 1980 and 2002, shows that the presence of left-leaning parties in government is…

There is an ambiguity in Amartya Sen's capability approach as to what constitutes an individual's resources, conversion factors and valuable functionings. What we here call the "circularity problem" points to the fact that all three concepts seem to be mutually endogenous and interdependent. To econometrically account for this…

In recent years, research on the important value of generalized trust has been expanded to include immigrants as a group, but it may be questioned whether the frequently employed generalized trust construct is a valid cross-group measure of this phenomenon for natives and non-Western immigrants in Western societies. Building on a Danish survey of…

Most studies that explore the impact of relative standing on subjective well-being use objective measures of the individual's relative position, such as the mean income of the reference group or the individual's ranking in the relevant income distribution. In this paper, using a new household survey from South Africa, we are able to derive…

This paper analyses the situation when employees fail to adapt to overall job dissatisfaction. By combining the existing knowledge in economics on job lock and in psychology on employees' feeling of being "stuck" at work, the paper explains why some employees fail to adapt when dissatisfied with their job. Thus, the paper aims to expand…

For a long time, researchers investigate the impact of diversity on society. To measure diversity, either archival data at the national level of census data at the neighborhood level, within a single country are used. Both approaches are limited. The first approach does not allow to investigate variation in diversity within countries and the…

This study examined the relationship between perceived fairness of social policies and subjective well-being. Two types of policies examined were related to income distribution and social security. Subjective well-being was measured by work and life satisfaction. In addition, subjective well-beings between different income, age, and education…

This study examines the role of cultural values and political ideologies in the development of materialism, and the impact of materialism on subjective well-being, in the Chinese context. A survey was conducted of 487 persons in two cities in China and the results analyzed using structural equation modeling. The findings show that China's…

This paper investigates the effects of higher education expansion on the phenomena of credentialism and gender discrimination in education. Using the survey data of Family Income and Expenditure by DGBAS, Taiwan from 1980 to 2009, we examine the time path of the effect of higher education expansion on household expenditures for children's…

Depression is one of the leading causes of disability in the developed world. Previous studies have shown varying depression prevalence rates between European countries, and also within countries, between socioeconomic groups. However, it is unclear whether these differences reflect true variations in prevalence or whether they are attributable to…

This paper analyses the determinants of an important component of well-being among individuals aged 50 years or older in eleven European countries: satisfaction with social contacts. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and anchoring vignettes to correct for potential differences in responses scales across…

This article aims to explore public perceptions of global food risk issues and public attitudes towards government capacity to respond to concerns with technological and health uncertainties in an era of rapid economic development in newly industrialized countries. From cross-national comparative research on global food risk issues in the EU, UK,…

In this article, we investigate the effect of individual and community level characteristics on subjective well-being in Belgium. Various indicators for subjective well-being are being used in a multilevel analysis of the 2009 SCIF survey (n = 2,080) and the 2006 Belgian ESS sample (n = 1,798). On the individual level, most hypotheses on the…

Empirical analyses of the determinants of life satisfaction routinely include the number of children as one of the socio demographic controls, without explicitly considering that, for a given household income, more children imply a lower level of income per family member. The variable "number of children" then often attracts a negative…

Persons with chronic disabilities report the lowest subjective well-being (SWB) in many countries. The gap in SWB compared with the non-disabled population is smaller in some countries than in others. Data from the European Social Survey were analysed in order to: (1) describe the inequality in SWB in 21 European countries; and (2) identify the…