What Do Happiness Data Mean? Theory and Survey Evidence

For helpful feedback, we thank Joan Broderick, Kristen Cooper, Angus Deaton, Dick Easterlin, Danny Kahneman, Andrew Oswald, Matthew Rabin, Alex Rees-Jones, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur Stone; participants at the Cornell Behavioral Economics Research Group, Cornell Behavioral/Experimental Lab Meetings, Hebrew University Behavioral/Experimental Economics Meetings, AEA annual meetings; BEAM, NBER Summer Institute, and seminar participants at Colorado Boulder, London School of Economics, Louvain la Neuve, Paris School of Economics, Princeton, Stockholm Institute for Future Studies, Warwick, Wharton, UC Berkeley, and USC. We are grateful to Ophir Averbuch, Joel Becker, Samantha Cunningham, Ofer Glicksohn, Arshia Hashemi, Aharon Haver, Yuezhou (Celena) Huo, Mattar Klein, Lev Maresca, Josef McCrum, Ayala Goldfarb, Yotam Peterfreund, Tamar Yerushalmi, and Jianing (Jenny) Ying for excellent research assistance. For financial support, we are grateful to the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program grant no. DGE-1144153, and NIH/NIA grants R01-AG065364 to Hebrew University, R01-AG040787 to the University of Michigan, R01-AG051903 to UCLA, and P30-AG024928 to Princeton University. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or other funding bodies. The authors received IRB approval from the relevant institutions and have no material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• Web Appendix
• Individual Responses Web Appendix

• February 12, 2021
• May 18, 2021