We combine survey responses to subjective well-being (SWB) questions with air pollution data to recover Chinese residents' valuation of air quality improvements. Motivated by theoretical models of ‘projection bias’ and ‘recency bias’, we posit that one's SWB (and valuation) is affected disproportionately by more recent experiences with air pollution, even though long-term air pollution is more detrimental to one's actual well-being.

In this article we present results from the Cape Area Panel Study investigating
how income comparisons affect the subjective well-being of young adults and parents.

This paper examines whether intergenerational transmission of happiness exists in China between preadolescents and their parents, and what factors are correlated with subjective well-being among them.

This is a PhD dissertation by Haileselassie Medhin and containing seven self-contained papers:

Concerns for environmental quality and its impact on people's welfare are fundamental arguments for the adoption of environmental legislation in most countries. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between air quality and subjective well-being in Europe. We use a unique dataset that merges three waves of the European Social Survey with a new dataset on environmental quality including SO2 concentrations and climate in Europe at the regional level. We find a robust negative impact of SO2 concentrations on self-reported life satisfaction.

Does relative income have an impact on subjective well-being among extremely poor people? Contrary to the findings in developed countries, where relative income has shown a significant and negative impact on subjective well-being, this study (based on different definitions of reference groups) suggests that relative income does not affect subjective well-being among the very poor people in northern Ethiopia.

We conducted a survey in the Guangdong province in China to measure happiness among preadolescents and their parents. The objective of this study was to investigate what explains preadolescents’ happiness level and whether their happiness is related to the happiness level of their parents. We do not find any significant relationship with respect to the latter, and the factors that explain the variation in happiness among parents do not explain the variation among children.

This paper examines the concern for relative standing among rural households in China. We used a survey-experimental method to measure to what extent poor Chinese farmers care about their relative income and found that the respondents cared to a high degree

The authors investigated attitudes toward positionality among rural farmers in northern Ethiopia, using a tailored two-part survey experiment. On average, they found positional concerns neither in income per se, nor in income from aid projects among the farmers. These results support the claim that positional concerns are correlated with absolute level of income of a country.

Using household surveys with highly disaggregated geographic reference, the authors explored how national parks affect local wages in Costa Rica and how effects on local welfare can be positive or negative in different parks or even within different areas of a park.