Title
From Average Joe's happiness to Miserable Jane and Cheerful John: Using quantile regressions to analyze the full subjective well-being distribution
Date Issued
01 August 2011
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Binder M.
Max Planck Institute of Economics
Publisher(s)
Elsevier
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.
Start page
275
End page
290
Volume
79
Issue
3
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Estadísticas, Probabilidad Economía
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-79960900404
Source
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
ISSN of the container
01672681
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus