اکتشاف بر اساس داده های پانل روسیه

Well-being research has supported the common sense view that income, health, and other factors affect happiness. We use panel data from Russia to assess the reverse causation — that happiness itself affects income, health, and other factors. We find that people who had higher “residual happiness” in 1995 – people who were happier after correcting for the usual determinants of well-being – made more money and were in better health in a survey 5 years later. Psychologists attribute a large part of well-being to factors such as self-esteem and optimism. The same factors appear to influence individuals’ wealth and health.

The study of happiness, or subjective well-being, and its implications for economic behavior is a fairly new area for economists, although psychologists have been studying it for years. The findings of this research highlight the non-income determinants of economic behavior. For example, cross-country studies of happiness consistently demonstrate that after certain minimum levels of per capita income, average happiness levels do not increase as countries grow wealthier.1 Within societies, most studies find that wealthier individuals are on average happier than poor ones, but after a minimum level of income, more money does not make people much happier.2 Because income plays such an important role in standard definitions and measures of well-being, these findings have theoretical, empirical, and policy implications. Some of the earliest economists (such as Jeremy Bentham) were concerned with the pursuit of individual happiness. As the field became more rigorous and quantitative, however, much narrower definitions of individual welfare, or utility, became the norm, even though economics was still concerned with public welfare in the broader sense. In addition, economists have traditionally shied away from the use of survey data because of justifiable concerns that answers to surveys are subject to bias from factors such as respondents’ mood at the time of the survey and minor changes in the phrasing of survey questions.3 Thus, traditional economic analysis focuses on actual behavior, such as revealed preferences in consumption, savings, and labor market participation, under the assumption that individuals rationally process all the information at their disposal to maximize their utility.4 More recently, behavioral economics has begun to have influence at the margin, as an increasing number of economists supplement the methods and research questions more common to economists with those more common to psychologists.5