nep-hap New Economics Papers
on Economics of Happiness
Issue of 2022‒11‒21
two papers chosen by



  1. Time-Use and Subjective Well-Being: Is there a Preference for Activity Diversity? By Naomi Friedman-Sokuler; Claudia Senik
  2. Spatial Extension of the Mixed Models of the Analysis of Variance By Takaki Sato; Yuta Kuroda; Yasumasa Matsuda

  1. By: Naomi Friedman-Sokuler (Bar-Ilan University [Israël]); Claudia Senik (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, SU - Sorbonne Université)
    Abstract: Using the American and the French time-use surveys, we examine whether people have a preference for a more diversified mix of activities, in the sense that, everything else equal, they experience a higher level of well-being when their agenda is multi-activity, rather than concentrated on a very small number of activities. This could be due to decreasing marginal utility, as is assumed for the consumption of goods, if each episode of time is conceived as yielding a certain level of utility per se. However, in the presence of returns to specialization, people would face a trade-off between the efficiency of specialization and the taste for diversity, as concerns time arrangements. We test these hypotheses and investigate potential gender differences with regard to these patterns.
    Keywords: Time allocation,Time-use diversity,Subjective well-being,Life satisfaction,Momentary utility,Gender Time allocation,Gender
    Date: 2022–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-03828272&r=hap
  2. By: Takaki Sato; Yuta Kuroda; Yasumasa Matsuda
    Abstract: This paper proposes a spatial extension of the mixed models of the analysis of variance(MANOVA) models, which are called mixed spatial ANOVA (MS-ANOVA) models. MS-ANOVA models have been used to evaluate spatial correlations between random effects in multilevel data which is a kind of cluster data in which observations belong to some kinds of nested clusters. Because the proposed model can be regarded as a Bayesian hierarchical models, we have introduced empirical Bayesian estimation methods in which hyper parameters are estimated by quasi-maximum likelihood estimation methods in the first step and posterior distributions for the parameters are evaluated with the estimated hyper-parameters in the second step. Moreover, we have justified the asymptotic properties of the first step estimators. The proposed models are applied to happiness survey data in Japan and empirical results show that social capital which can be interpreted as "the beliefs and norms by which a community values collective action and pursues activities worthy for the entire community" significantly increases people's happiness, even after controlling for a variety of individual characteristics and spatial correlations.
    Date: 2022–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:toh:dssraa:132&r=hap

General information on the NEP project can be found at https://nep.repec.org. For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at <director@nep.repec.org>. Put “NEP” in the subject, otherwise your mail may be rejected.
NEP’s infrastructure is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand.