Subjective Well-Being in Times of Crisis Evidence on the wider impact of economic crises and turmoil on subjective well-being


Speaker


Abstract

Over the last few years, policy-makers and scholars have highlighted the (complementary) role of subjective well-being (SWB) indicators in evaluating economic and social progress, however, research on SWB related to the causes and consequences of socioeconomic phenomena such as social uprisings and economic crises is in general limited. In his dissertation I use subjective judgments of how well we do in life to provide evidence on the wider impact of economic crises and turmoil on SWB. In the first part of this dissertation, I explore the relative performance of an income-based indicator of prosperity compared to a subjective well-being indicator of prosperity and empirically examine the factors that possibly drive their differences. My findings suggest that four key factors – perceptions about standards of living, unemployment rates, perceptions about local job market and perceptions about corruption in government– explain the discrepancy between the two types of measures. In the second part, I examine the sources and preconditions in which positive economic progress goes hand in hand with dissatisfaction and preconditions in which negative economic progress is less painful. Despite the progress observed in many Arab Spring countries prior to the social uprisings, the decline observed in life satisfaction on the eve of the Arab spring was associated primarily with dissatisfaction with the standard of living, poor labor market conditions, and corruption in the form of nepotism or cronyism. Regarding the impact of economic downturns on SWB, I find three factors that moderate SWB losses; financial distress, economic expectations and regional quality of governance.