Life Satisfaction and Air Quality in Europe

By Susana Ferreira, Alpaslan Akay, Finbarr Brereton, Juncal Cunado, Peter Martinsson, Mirko Moro, Tine Ningal. Social Science Research Network, 2012

282 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Concerns for environmental quality and its impact on people's welfare are fundamental arguments for the adoption of environmental legislation in most countries. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between air quality and subjective well-being in Europe. We use a unique dataset that merges three waves of the European Social Survey with a new dataset on environmental quality including SO2 concentrations and climate in Europe at the regional level. We find a robust negative impact of SO2 concentrations on self-reported life satisfaction.

Subfields: Health, Social Psychology, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42f9ef6eec361374054a4205860f5f160e4d0536

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Health

1. Jangik Jin
2. Danya Kim
3. Xin Zhang
4. Xiaobo Zhang
5. Xi Chen

In Social Psychology

1. Christian Krekel
2. Jangik Jin
3. Danya Kim
4. Xin Zhang
5. Alexander Zerrahn
6. Xiaobo Zhang
7. Xi Chen

In Transportation

1. Xin Zhang
2. Xiaobo Zhang
3. Xi Chen

Citations in the corpus

• Does happiness data say urban parks are worth it? (2018, methodology): “Recently, researchers have begun to use life satisfaction data to estimate the value of environmental amenities, such as scenic amenity (Ambrey & Fleming, 2011), weather (Feddersen, Metcalfe, & Wooden, 2012), and air quality (Ferreira et al., 2013; Levinson, 2012).”
• Does the presence of wind turbines have negative externalities for people in their surroundings? Evidence from well-being data (2017, background): “As this approach has already been applied to various other environmental externalities, including air pollution (Ambrey et al., 2014; Ferreira et al., 2013; Levinson, 2012), landscape amenities (Kopmann and Rehdanz, 2013), noise pollution (Rehdanz and Maddison, 2008; van Praag and Baarsma, 2005), or”
• Happiness in the Air: How Does a Dirty Sky Affect Mental Health and Subjective Well-being? (2017, background): “For example, monitoring stations often only record ambient concentrations every few days (Levinson 2012), and air pollution data tend to be aggregated over a rather long period, such as one year (Ferreira et al. 2013).”
• A review of air pollution impact on subjective well-being: Survey versus visual psychophysics (2018, unknown): “Ferreira et al. (2013) first conducted cross-sectional analyses with spatially disaggregated data at the region level on SO2 to explain individual SWB in Europe.”