Related papers: Are international happiness rankings reliable?
This paper aims to enhance our understanding of substantive questions regarding self-reported happiness and well-being through the specification and use of multi-level models. To date, there have been numerous quantitative research studies…
Many scholars have recently begun to dispute the assumed link between individual wellbeing and economic conditions and the extent to which the latter matters (Easterlin, 1995; Stevenson and Wolfers 2008; Tella and MacCulloch 2008). This…
Multilateral index numbers are often used to make claims about welfare, such as treating PPPs as cross-country costs of living or real incomes as indicators of living standards. However, such interpretations may not be consistent with the…
A tailor-made internet survey experiment provides individuals with information on their income positions to examine their effects on subjective well-being. In the first survey, respondents were asked about their household income and…
Traditionally, European social policies have focused on material well-being and social justice, neglecting subjective indicators. This review systematically examines the scientific understanding of well-being, its indicators, and its…
Pressured by globalization and the increasing demand for public organisations to be accountable, efficient and transparent, university rankings have become an important tool for assessing the quality of higher education institutions. It is…
Different theories posit different sources for feelings of well-being and happiness. Appraisal theory grounds our emotional responses in our goals and desires and their fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment. Self Determination theory posits…
Remittances provide an essential connection between people working abroad and their home countries. This paper considers these transfers as a measure of preferences revealed by the workers, underlying a ranking of countries around the…
We employ a flexible parametric model to estimate global income, health, and education distributions from 1980 to 2015. Using these marginal distributions within a copula-based framework, we construct a global joint distribution of…
In this work, we analyze the happiness levels of countries using an unbiased emotion detector, artificial intelligence (AI). To date, researchers proposed many factors that may affect happiness such as wealth, health and safety. Even though…
Subjective well-being is a key metric in economic, medical, and policy decision-making. As artificial intelligence provides scalable tools for modelling human outcomes, it is crucial to evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) can…
Ordered probit and logit models have been frequently used to estimate the mean ranking of happiness outcomes (and other ordinal data) across groups. However, it has been recently highlighted that such ranking may not be identified in most…
I propose that quality of life can be compared despite the difference in values across cultures when it is experienced at the sensory and perceptual level. I argue that an approach to assessing quality of life which focuses on an…
With the advent of highly capable instruction-tuned neural language models, benchmarking in natural language processing (NLP) is increasingly shifting towards pairwise comparison leaderboards, such as LMSYS Arena, from traditional global…
This paper describes a fundamental and empirically conspicuous problem inherent to surveys of human feelings and opinions in which subjective responses are elicited on numerical scales. The paper also proposes a solution. The problem is a…
There is a vast literature on the determinants of subjective wellbeing. International organisations and statistical offices are now collecting such survey data at scale. However, standard regression models explain surprisingly little of the…
World University rankings have become well-established tools that students, university managers and policy makers read and use. Each ranking claims to have a unique methodology capable of measuring the 'quality' of universities. The purpose…
The article reviews the history of well-being to gauge how subjective question surveys can improve our understanding of well-being in Mexico. The research uses data at the level of the 32 federal entities or States, taking advantage of the…
Life satisfaction is a crucial facet of human well-being. Hence, research on life satisfaction is incumbent for understanding how individuals experience their lives and influencing interventions targeted at enhancing mental health and…
Using 2.6 billion geolocated social-media posts (2014-2022) and a fine-tuned generative language model, we construct county-level indicators of life satisfaction and happiness for the United States. We document an apparent rural-urban…