Journal
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR & ORGANIZATION
Volume 79, Issue 3, Pages 275-290Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2011.02.005
Keywords
Quantile regressions; Subjective well-being; Happiness; Life satisfaction; Mental well-being; BHPS
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Standard regression techniques are only able to give an incomplete picture of the relationship between subjective well-being and its determinants since the very idea of conventional estimators such as OLS is the averaging out over the whole distribution: studies based on such regression techniques thus are implicitly only interested in Average Joe's happiness. Using cross-sectional data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for the year 2006, we apply quantile regressions to analyze effects of a set of explanatory variables on different quantiles of the happiness distribution and compare these results with a standard regression. Among our results we observe a decreasing importance of income, health status and social factors with increasing quantiles of happiness. Another finding is that education has a positive association with happiness at the lower quantiles but a negative association at the upper quantiles. We explore the robustness of our findings in various ways. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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