Journal Article
From Average Joe's happiness to Miserable Jane and Cheerful John: using quantile regressions to analyze the full subjective well-being distribution
Authors
Publication date
2011
Abstract
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.
Published in
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Volume and page numbers
79 , 275 -290
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2011.02.005
ISSN
16
Links
http://serlib0.essex.ac.uk/record=b1646363~S5
Notes
Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to Univ. Essex registered users*
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