Well-Being across America

By Andrew J. Oswald, Stephen Wu. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2011

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper uses Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data to study life satisfaction and mental health across the geography of the United States. The analysis draws on a sample of 1.3 million citizens. Initially we control for people's personal characteristics (though not income). There is no correlation between states' regression-adjusted well-being and their GDP per capita. States like Louisiana, plus Washington, D.C., have high psychological well-being levels; California and West Virginia have low well-being. When we control for incomes, satisfaction with life is lower in richer states, just as compensating-differentials theory would predict. Nevertheless, some puzzles remain.

Subfields: Health, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed1165c2564c0d52cd044742441463698277a137

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Citations in the corpus

Unequal hopes and lives in the USA: optimism, race, place, and premature mortality (2019, background): “Oswald and Wu (2011) use mid-2000s data and find that blacks reported fewer bad mental health days than whites.”
The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter Sentiment and Expression, Demographics, and Objective Characteristics of Place (2013, methodology): “This is in contrast with the findings of Oswald and Wu [15,16], who determined Louisiana to be the state with highest well-being according to an alternate survey-based measure of life satisfaction.”