Income is more protective against pain in more equal countries.

It is empirically well-established that the rich suffer less pain on average than the poor. However, much less is known about the factors that moderate the size of the income gradient of pain. Using data from over 1 million adults from 127 countries worldwide, this article conducts a systematic test on whether income inequality moderates the pain gap between the rich and the poor.

Large losses from little lies: Strategic gender misrepresentation and cooperation.

This paper investigates the possibility that a small deceptive act of misrepresenting one's gender to others reduces cooperation in the Golden Balls game, a variant of a prisoner's dilemma game. Compared to treatments where either participants' true genders are revealed to each other in a pair or no information on gender is given, the treatment effects of randomly selecting people to be allowed to misrepresent their gender on defection are positive, sizeable, and statistically significant. Allowing people to misrepresent their gender reduces the average cooperation rate by approximately 10-12 percentage points.

Risk compensation during COVID-19: The impact of face mask usage on social distancing.

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, governments around the world have recommended or required minimum physical distancing between individuals, as well as either mandating or recommending the use of face coverings (masks) in certain circumstances. When multiple risk reduction activities can be adopted, people may engage in risk compensation by responding to a reduced (perceived) risk exposure due to one activity by increasing risk exposure due to another. We tested for risk compensation in two online experiments that investigated whether either wearing a mask or seeing others wearing masks reduced physical distancing.

The Effects of Retirement on Sense of Purpose in Life: Crisis or Opportunity?

Does retirement lead to an existential crisis or present an opportunity to experience a renewed sense of purpose in life? Prior research has documented a negative association between retirement and sense of purpose in life, suggesting that retirement could lead people to feel aimless and lost. We revisited these findings using a quasiexperimental approach and identified the causal impact of retirement on purpose in life. In a nationally representative panel of American adults ( = 8,113), we applied an instrumental-variable analysis to assess how Social Security retirement incentives in the United States drove differences in the likelihood of retirement.

When face masks signal social identity: Explaining the deep face-mask divide during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging and the vaccination program still rolling out, there continues to be an immediate need for public health officials to better understand the mechanisms behind the deep and perpetual divide over face masks in America. Using a random sample of Americans (N = 615), following a pre-registered experimental design and analysis plan, we first demonstrated that mask wearers were not innately more cooperative as individuals than non-mask wearers in the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) game when information about their own and the other person's mask usage was not salient. However, we found strong evidence of in-group favouritism among both mask and non-mask wearers when information about the other partner's mask usage was known.

COVID-19, lockdowns and well-being: Evidence from Google Trends.

The COVID-19 pandemic and government intervention such as lockdowns may severely affect people's mental health. While lockdowns can help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to population well-being. We use Google Trends data to test whether COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns implemented in Europe and America led to changes in well-being related topic search-terms.

Buying Happiness in an Unequal World: Rank of Income More Strongly Predicts Well-Being in More Unequal Countries.

Does income rank matter more for well-being in more unequal countries? Using more than 160,000 observations from 24 countries worldwide, we replicate previous studies and show that the ranked position of an individual's income strongly predicts life evaluation and positive daily emotional experiences, whereas absolute and reference income generally have weak or no effects. Furthermore, we find the association between income rank and an individual's well-being to be significantly larger in countries where income inequality, represented by the share of taxable income held by the top 1% of income earners, is high. These results are robust to using an alternative measure of income inequality and different reference group specifications.

LOCUS OF CONTROL AND ITS INTERGENERATIONAL IMPLICATIONS FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD SKILL FORMATION.

This article builds upon Cunha's (2015) subjective rationality model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on their children's early skill formation. We propose that this subjective belief is determined partly by locus of control (LOC), i.e.

DO YOU HAVE TO WIN IT TO FIX IT? A Longitudinal Study of Lottery Winners and Their Health-Care Demand.

We exploit lottery wins to investigate the effects of exogenous changes to individuals' income on the utilization of health care services, and the choice between private and public health care in the United Kingdom. Our empirical strategy focuses on lottery winners in an individual fixed effects framework and hence the variation of winnings arises from within-individual differences in small versus large winnings. The results indicate that lottery winners with larger wins are more likely to choose private health services than public health services from the National Health Service.

LONGITUDINAL EVIDENCE FOR A MIDLIFE NADIR IN HUMAN WELL-BEING: RESULTS FROM FOUR DATA SETS.

There is a large amount of cross-sectional evidence for a midlife low in the life cycle of human happiness and well-being (a 'U shape'). Yet no genuinely longitudinal inquiry has uncovered evidence for a U-shaped pattern. Thus, some researchers believe the U is a statistical artefact.

Can having internal locus of control insure against negative shocks? Psychological evidence from panel data.

We investigate whether the intensity of emotional pain following a negative shock is different across the distribution of a person's locus of control - the extent to which individuals believe that their actions can influence future outcomes. Using panel data from Australia, we show that individuals with strong internal locus of control are psychologically insured against own and others' serious illness or injury, close family member detained in jail, becoming a victim of property crime and death of a close friend, but not against the majority of other life events. The buffering effects vary across gender.

Are happier people less judgmental of other people's selfish behaviors? Experimental survey evidence from trust and gift exchange games.

What determines people's moral judgments of selfish behaviors? Here we study whether people's normative views in trust and gift exchange games, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance, are themselves functions of positive emotions. We use experimental survey methods to investigate the moral judgments of impartial observers empirically, and explore whether we could influence subsequent judgments by deliberately making some individuals happier. We find that moral judgments of selfish behaviors in the economic context depend strongly on the behavior of the interaction partner of the judged person, but their relationships are significantly moderated by an increase in happiness for the person making the judgment.

Life satisfaction and sexual minorities: Evidence from Australia and the United Kingdom.

Very little is known about how the differential treatment of sexual minorities could influence subjective reports of overall well-being. This paper seeks to fill this gap. Data from two large surveys that provide nationally representative samples for two different countries -Australia and the UK - are used to estimate a simultaneous equations model of life satisfaction.

What's the good of education on our overall quality of life? A simultaneous equation model of education and life satisfaction for Australia.

Many economists and educators favour public support for education on the premise that education improves the overall quality of life of citizens. However, little is known about the different pathways through which education shapes people's satisfaction with life overall. One reason for this is because previous studies have traditionally analysed the effect of education on life satisfaction using single-equation models that ignore interrelationships between different theoretical explanatory variables.

What childhood characteristics predict psychological resilience to economic shocks in adulthood?

This paper investigates whether people's psychological resilience to one of the most important economic shocks - job loss - can be predicted using early childhood characteristics. Using a longitudinal data that tracked almost 3000 children into adulthood, we showed that the negative effect of unemployment on mental well-being and life satisfaction is significantly larger for workers who, as adolescents, had a relatively poor father-child relationship. Maternal unemployment, on the other hand, is a good predictor of how individuals react psychologically to future unemployment.

WHAT PREDICTS A SUCCESSFUL LIFE? A LIFE-COURSE MODEL OF WELL-BEING.

Policy-makers who care about well-being need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a model using the British Cohort Study (1970). We show that the most powerful childhood predictor of adult life-satisfaction is the child's emotional health, followed by the child's conduct.

Does more education lead to better health habits? Evidence from the school reforms in Australia.

The current study provides new empirical evidence on the causal effect of education on health-related behaviors by exploiting historical changes in the compulsory schooling laws in Australia. Since World War II, Australian states increased the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 15 in different years. Using differences in the laws regarding minimum school leaving age across different cohorts and across different states as a source of exogenous variation in education, we show that more education improves people's diets and their tendency to engage in more regular exercise and drinking moderately, but not necessarily their tendency to avoid smoking and to engage in more preventive health checks.

Parental unemployment and children's happiness: A longitudinal study of young people's well-being in unemployed households.

Using a unique longitudinal data of British youths we estimate how adolescents' overall happiness is related to parents' exposure to unemployment. Our within-child estimates suggest that parental job loss when the child was relatively young has a positive influence on children's overall happiness. However, this positive association became either strongly negative or statistically insignificant as the child grew older.

Putting different price tags on the same health condition: re-evaluating the well-being valuation approach.

Many recent writings in health policy have proposed that health be valued directly and in monetary terms using the new well-being valuation method. Yet there is no clear consensus on what the best measure of individual's experience may be for the evaluation process. To shed light on this issue, monetary values for a number of health problems are compared across different well-being measures within the same UK data set.

What happens to people before and after disability? Focusing effects, lead effects, and adaptation in different areas of life.

This paper addresses the question of when and to what extent different areas of a person's life are affected by mild and severe disability. We use a nationally representative longitudinal dataset of British individuals to examine what happens to seven different areas of life - health, income, housing, partner, social life, amount of leisure time, and use of leisure time - before and after disability. We found that although there is some evidence of lead effects to becoming disabled in more than one aspects of life, the strongest lead effects are found in the health domain.

Ill-health as a household norm: evidence from other people's health problems.

This paper proposes that an individual's self-assessed health (SAH) does not only suffer from systematic reporting bias and adaptation bias but is also biased owing to confounding health norm effects. Using 13 waves of the British Household Panel Survey covering the period 1991-2005, I show that, while there is a negative and statistically significant correlation between SAH and individuals' own health problem index, this negative effect reduces with the average number of health problems per (other) family member. The relative health bias is small, however, which implies that measures of SAH may not suffer seriously from systematic health norm bias.