Essays in the economics of subjective well-being

Thesis

This thesis explores three major issues in the burgeoning empirical literature on the determinants of subjective well-being (SWB).

While economic theory assumes that it is current consumption that matters to SWB, empirical work has focused almost exclusively on the effect of income. In Part 1, we use household panel data from Russia and Britain to show that neither the standard theoretical account, nor the standard empirical practice may be adequate. Consumption, income, and wealth e...

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Authors: Goldsmith, G; Glenn Fraser Goldsmith

• Publication date: 2011
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Russia; subjective well-being; panel data; Britain; social comparison; heterogeneity; penalised maximum likelihood; penalised Gaussian mixture model
• Subjects: Social Sciences; Econometrics; Social psychology; Economics; Psychology