[…] or her personal life. Capabilities are in Sen’s vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people have or the opportunities available to them. In this paper we examine the impact of capabilities alongside choices on well-being. There is a lot of theoretical work on Sen’s capability framework but still a lack of empirical research in measuring […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This annual article on the latest survey of households carried out by NMG Consulting on behalf of the Bank focuses on the potential impact of higher interest rates.

[…] 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 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 […]

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 […]

[…] 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 […]