Volunteering, subjective well-being and public policy

We apply matching estimators to the large-scale British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set to estimate the impact of volunteering on subjective well-being. We take into account personality traits that could jointly determine volunteering behaviour and subjective well-being. We find that the impact of regular volunteering on subjective well-being is positive and increasing over […]

“I’m afraid I have bad news for you.” Estimating the impact of different health impairments on subjective well-being

Bad health decreases individuals’ happiness, but few studies measure the impact of specific illnesses. We apply matching estimators to examine how changes in different (objective) conditions of bad health affect subjective well-being for a sample of 100,265 observations from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) database (1996e2006). The strongest effect is for alcohol and […]

Occupational characteristics, occupational sex segregation, and family migration decisions

This paper examines the effects of occupational characteristics on family migration within Britain. For the first time in the literature, we explicitly theorise and later test the impact of the sex composition of husbands’ and wives’ occupations on mobility decisions. The empirical analysis consists of panel regression models estimated on dyadic couple-level information from […]

Job satisfaction, age and tenure: a generalized dynamic random effects model

[…] We estimate a generalized dynamic random effects ordered probit model using the British Household Panel Survey. Contrary to previous literature, we find that age has no significant impact on job satisfaction for females, and a limited impact for males who report higher levels of job satisfaction. We also find that tenure shares a non-monotonic […]

Unemployment impacts differently on the extremes of the distribution of a comprehensive well-being measure

Unemployment has a heterogeneous effect on well-being. We combine a quantile analysis with matching techniques to analyse the negative impact of unemployment along the well-being distribution of a comprehensive well-being variable. In our analysis of British Household Panel Survey data (1996–2008) we focus on transitions into unemployment and find that average effects of unemployment […]

The impact of mixing modes on reliability in longitudinal studies

Mixed-mode designs are increasingly important in surveys, and large longitudinal studies are progressively moving to or considering such a design. In this context, our knowledge regarding the impact of mixing modes on data quality indicators in longitudinal studies is sparse. This study tries to ameliorate this situation by taking advantage of a quasi-experimental design […]

Individual differences in loss aversion

[…] or the person making the decision. We hypothesized that conscientiousness would predict an aversion to losses in the financial domain. We index loss aversion by the relative impact of income losses and gains on life satisfaction. In a representative German sample (N = 105,558; replicated in a British sample, N = 33,848), with conscientiousness […]

The association of interpersonal relationships and social support with early post-surgery weight loss -conference paper abstract-

[…] most effective weight-loss treatment for patients with severe obesity, however post-surgery weight loss is highly variable. We hypothesized that social support and good quality interpersonal relationships would impact upon the patient’s ability to make required changes to eating behaviour and lifestyle post-surgery and thus impact upon weight loss. Methods: Between November 2014 and June […]