Cross-Country Determinants of Life Satisfaction: Exploring Different Determinants across Groups in Society
Series
http://ideas.repec.org/p/usg/dp2005/2005-19.html
Type
discussion paper
Date Issued
2005-11-12
Author(s)
Bjornskov, Christian
;
Dreher, Axel
;
Fischer, Justina
Abstract
This paper explores a wide range of determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 73 countries, based in turn on about 100 000 observations. The determinants can be categorized in four groups: political, economic, institutional factors and human development and culture. The relevance of these factors is estimated on country-level averages of satisfaction of sub-groups of national populations according to gender, income and political orientation, using OLS, robust regression and Extreme Bounds Analysis techniques. Our results show that only a small number of factors robustly influence life satisfaction across countries while the importance of a large number of alternative factors suggested in the previous literature is rejected.
Language
English
Keywords
Welfare
Life Satisfaction
Public Economics
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
No
Publisher
University of St. Gallen, Department of Economics
Number
2005-19
Subject(s)
Eprints ID
21267