What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?

By Bruno S. Frey, Alois Stutzer. 2001

4,048 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important insights for economics. We report how the economic variables income, unemployment and inflation affect happiness as well as how institutional factors, in particular the type of democracy and the extent of government decentralization, systematically influence how satisfied individuals are with their life. We discuss some of the consequences for economic policy and for economic theory.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

How researchers see this paper

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

In General Health Professions

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Institutional Trust and Subjective Well‐Being across the EU (2006, background): “The evidence ongender differences is somewhat inconclusive and althoughDi Tella et al. (2001) conclude that females are happier than males, Frey and Stutzer (2002a) find small and declining differences.”
Pro-environmental behavior and rational consumer choice: Evidence from surveys of life satisfaction (2010, methodology): “Using subjective well-being data follows a recent line of research in economics (see Frey and Stutzer 2002, Layard 2005, Di Tella and MacCulloch 2006, Bruni and Porta 2007).”
Empirical Tests of Optimal Cognitive Distance (2004, background): “…control, especially in contemporary organizations of more or less autonomous professionals, and the desire for intrinsic next to extrinsic motives (Frey, 2002), people in organizations also need to share more or less tacit values and norms, to align objectives, govern relational risk and to…”
Beauty is the Promise of Happiness? (2011, neutral): “3”
Interpretations of Utility and Their Implications for the Valuation of Health (2008, background): “…2001).6 There is evidence that the income an individual considers to be sufficient is primarily determined by her current income (van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2004), and that adaptation appears to offset about two-thirds of the benefits of any increase in income (Frey and Stutzer, 2002).”
Using Happiness Data for Environmental Valuation: Issues and Applications (2009, neutral): “Surveys on the use of happiness data in economics have appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature (Frey and Stutzer, 2002), the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Di Tella and MacCullough, 2006) and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Graham, 2008).”
Quantifying the costs of drought: new evidence from life satisfaction data (2009, background): “Starting with the general determinants of life satisfaction, the validity of our data is confirmed by the estimates for age, gender, marital status, unemployment and log household income, which are all in line with the results from previous national and international studies (see Frey and Stutzer 2”