SENIK Claudia

We explore the effects of adapted physical exercise programs in nursing homes, in which some residents suffer from dementia and/or physical limitations and others do not. We use data from 452 participants followed over 12 months in 32 retirement homes in four European countries. Using a difference-in-difference with individual random effects model, we show that the program had a significant impact on the number of falls and the self-declared health and health-related quality of life of residents (EQ-5D). The wide scope of this study, in terms of sites, countries, and measured outcomes, brings generality to previously existing evidence. A simple computation, in the case of France, suggests that such programs are highly cost-efficient.

We explore the effects of adapted physical exercise programs in nursing homes, in which some residents suffer from dementia and/or physical limitations and other do not. We use data from 452 participants followed over 12 months in 32 retirement homes in four European countries. Using a difference-in-difference with individual random effects model, we show that the program has exerted a significant impact on the number of falls and the self-declared health and health-related quality of life of residents (EQ-5D). The wide scope of this study, in terms of sites, countries, and measured outcomes, brings generality to previously existing evidence. A simple computation, in the case of France, suggests that such programs are highly cost-efficient.

That wage satisfaction depends on reference wage is now an acquis of the empirical happiness literature. Employees care about their coworkers’ wage. They compare to different notions of reference wage and suffer from disadvantageous comparisons, more than they enjoy advantageous ones. However, reference wage sometimes acts in a positive way, as a carrier of information. In terms of methods, the empirical literature has developed in three stages. First, it started by enquiring about the statistical association between a notion of reference wage (or reference income) as defined by researchers, and self-declared satisfaction. Second, some researchers tried to elicit the direction of income comparisons by including direct questions in large surveys of the population. Third, researchers attempted to provide experimental evidence of the causal effect of comparisons on satisfaction (beyond the simple statistical association) using natural, field, and lab experiments.

"It is commonly accepted that trust is the elementary virtue of any social life: without trust, the behaviors of our fellow human beings would be unpredictable and dangerous, whereas it allows us to anticipate their actions and reactions. But the establishment of trust relies on cultural, institutional, social and, often, imaginary and religious devices. However, we have to recognize that our contemporary societies are disrupted by crises of confidence with very diverse manifestations: questioning of political elites, scientific knowledge and expertise, the success of conspiracy theories, etc. At the same time, these crises do not stop at the very beginning of the crisis. At the same time, these crises do not prevent the construction of other modalities of trust. While it is important to analyze the way in which trust is weakened, or even destroyed, it is also necessary to understand the continuous production of trust in new forms. This is the purpose of this collective work, which brings together original contributions by researchers from a number of human and social science disciplines: history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, political science, communication science, etc. These plural approaches help to shed light on a theme that embraces the entirety of the life of societies and can be broken down into multiple questions and objects.

Here is a masterful synthesis of the social practices of the French that challenges many preconceived ideas. The context? The French are more pessimistic than other Europeans. Why are they so pessimistic? Obviously because of their distrust of institutions and society. The result? Their private happiness depends, more than elsewhere, on their personal wealth. The various contributors to this book examine the relationship between money and the French, their generosity towards charities and their relationship to taxes. They also broaden the scope of the analysis of our behavior by describing the way couples coordinate to manage their transition to retirement. They decipher the very particular world of soccer, illustrated by the amount of player transfers that reach new records every season, and note the fragmentation of the world of work, of which the polarization of jobs is the most visible expression. Beyond the strictly economic approach, this ambitious picture of new research in progress helps to better understand French society and the world around it.

Here is a masterful synthesis of the social practices of the French that challenges many preconceived ideas. The context? The French are more pessimistic than other Europeans. Why are they so pessimistic? Obviously because of their distrust of institutions and society. The result? Their private happiness depends, more than elsewhere, on their personal wealth. The various contributors to this book examine the relationship between money and the French, their generosity towards charities and their relationship to taxes. They also broaden the scope of the analysis of our behavior by describing the way couples coordinate to manage their transition to retirement. They decipher the very particular world of soccer, illustrated by the amount of player transfers, which reach new records every season, and note the fragmentation of the world of work, of which the polarization of jobs is the most visible expression. Beyond the strictly economic approach, this ambitious picture of new research in progress helps to better understand French society and the world around it.

Here is a masterful synthesis of the social practices of the French that challenges many preconceived ideas. The context? The French are more pessimistic than other Europeans. Why are they so pessimistic? Obviously because of their distrust of institutions and society. The result? Their private happiness depends, more than elsewhere, on their personal wealth. The various contributors to this book examine the relationship between money and the French, their generosity towards charities and their relationship to taxes. They also broaden the scope of the analysis of our behaviors by describing the way in which couples coordinate to manage their transition to retirement. They decipher the very particular world of soccer, illustrated by the amount of player transfers that reach new records every season, and note the fragmentation of the world of work, of which the polarization of jobs is the most visible expression. Beyond the strictly economic approach, this ambitious picture of new research in progress helps to better understand French society and the world around it.

Since its inception four years ago, the Observatoire du bien-être has taken on the mission of examining the well-being of the French. This report aims to provide a picture of this activity, and in so doing, to paint a portrait of France through the prism of subjective well-being. First of all, work plays an essential role in satisfaction, not only because of the income it provides, but also because of the social relationships it creates and the meaning it gives to individual activity. It is especially through the professional sphere that the level of education contributes to satisfaction. Unfortunately, we note that in the field of work, perhaps more than in any other, the famous "French happiness deficit" is expressed through a higher level of dissatisfaction than among our European neighbors. This is perhaps why, unlike in many countries, the transition to retirement does not seem to be a difficult turning point in France, likely to cause a drop in well-being, even if it does result in a loss of income. For the unemployed, it even represents an exit from precariousness and stigma, which is clearly favorable to well-being. Secondly, social and private ties, the importance of which can be gauged by the particularly deleterious feeling of loneliness that is expressed in certain French municipalities. Indeed, it is in areas of demographic decline, where social life is receding, that we have recently seen signs of strong discontent: dissatisfaction, electoral abstention, and Yellow Vests demonstrations. All in all, the French rank worse than other Europeans on a large number of subjective measures of well-being despite a much less unfavorable situation in terms of objective indicators. We see this as a sign of a worried society, uncomfortable with the transformations that are taking place. Perhaps also, in a centralized society where much is expected of the state, it is particularly distressing to see the national scale largely overtaken by the scale of global change. The last chapter of this book adds historical depth to the analysis, and suggests that the notion of crisis, which appeared in the mid-1970s, has taken root in French society, along with the pessimism and dissatisfaction that accompany it. These observations, made over the past few years, take on new meaning in light of the Covid-19 crisis. While the government faces a difficult trade-off between fighting the epidemic and the economy, it is also gradually becoming aware of the need to preserve the well-being and mental health of the population.

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The book reveals the deep, sometimes invisible sources of well-being at work, which have a considerable impact on social and economic life. It reviews the levers that human resources should use to increase the professional fulfillment of their employees: autonomy, prospects for progression, etc. Well-being at work cannot be reduced to simple individual and psychological factors. It is largely due to the structure of companies, their type of management and their social climate, which can also cause great suffering. Based on recent French and international research, the economist Claudia Senik reveals the deep, sometimes invisible sources of well-being at work, which have a considerable impact on social and economic life. She reviews all the levers that human resources departments should use to increase the professional fulfillment of their employees: autonomy, prospects for advancement, symbolic valuation of functions, transparency of salary differentiation methods, etc.

The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 led to a massive migration wave from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel. We document the persistence and transmission of the Soviet unconventional gender norms, both vertically across generations of immigrants, and horizontally through neighborhood and school peer effects. Tracking the educational and occupational choices of a cohort of young Israeli women, we identify the persistence of two important features of the Soviet culture: the prioritization of science and technology, and the strong female attachment to paid-work. Women born in the FSU, who immigrated in infancy, are significantly more likely than natives and other immigrants to major in STEM in high school. In tertiary education, they remain over-represented in STEM, but also differ significantly from other women by their specific avoidance of study fields leading to “pink collar” jobs, such as education and social work. They also display a specific choice of work-life balance reflecting a greater commitment to paid-work. Finally, the choice patterns of native women shift towards STEM and away from traditional female study fields as the share of FSU immigrants in their lower-secondary school increases.

This paper uses relatively large-scale internet survey data from Japan to analyse income comparisons and income satisfaction. In contrast to the vast majority of empirical work in the area of subjective well-being, we are able to measure both the direction (to whom?) and intensity (how much?) dimensions of income comparisons. Relative to Europeans, the Japanese compare more to friends and less to colleagues, and compare their incomes more. The relationship between satisfaction and reference-group income is negative and more negative for those who say that they compare their incomes more. Our main finding concerns the measure of the relevant reference-group income. It is common in non-experimental work to calculate “others’ income” as some conditional or unconditional cell-mean, with the cells being defined by neighbourhood, workplace or demographic type. We show that two such cell-mean measures (one from within the dataset, the other matched in from external sources) fit the well-being data worse than does a simple self-reported measure of what relevant others earn. The self-reported measure of others’ income would arguably make a useful addition to many existing surveys.

Can people remember correctly their past well-being? We study three national surveys of the British, German and French population, where more than 50,000 European citizens were asked questions about their current and past life satisfaction. We uncover systematic biases in recalled subjective well-being: on average, people tend to overstate the improvement in their well-being over time and to understate their past happiness. But this aggregate figure hides a deep asymmetry: while happy people recall the evolution of their life to be better than it was, unhappy ones tend to exaggerate its worsening. It thus seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday. These results offer an explanation of why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks to be lower and are more open to new experiences.

No summary available.

Well-being at work cannot be reduced to simple individual and psychological factors. It is largely due to the structure of companies, their management style and their social climate, which can also cause great suffering. Based on recent French and international research, the economist Claudia Senik reveals the deep, sometimes invisible sources of well-being at work, which have a considerable impact on social and economic life. She reviews all the levers that human resources departments should use to increase the professional fulfillment of their employees: autonomy, prospects for advancement, symbolic value of functions, transparency of salary differentiation methods, etc.

The book reveals the deep, sometimes invisible sources of well-being at work, which have a considerable impact on social and economic life. It reviews the levers that human resources should use to increase the professional fulfillment of their employees: autonomy, prospects for progression, etc. Well-being at work cannot be reduced to simple individual and psychological factors. It is largely due to the structure of companies, their type of management and their social climate, which can also cause great suffering. Based on recent French and international research, the economist Claudia Senik reveals the deep, sometimes invisible sources of well-being at work, which have a considerable impact on social and economic life. She reviews all the levers that human resources departments should use to increase the professional fulfillment of their employees: autonomy, prospects for advancement, symbolic value of functions, transparency of salary differentiation methods, etc.

Using the 41-year division of Germany as a natural experiment, we show that the German Democratic Republic’s gender-equal institutions created a culture that has undone the male breadwinner norm and its consequences. Since reunification, East Germany still differs from West Germany not only because of its higher female contribution to household income, but also because East German women can earn more than their husbands without having to increase their number of housework hours, put their marriage at risk or withdraw from the labour market. By contrast, the norm of higher male income, and its consequences, are still prevalent in West Germany.

This thesis examines the determinants of wage inequality from a behavioral economics perspective. The first chapter analyzes students' orientation choices in higher education. Based on the content of motivation letters, we describe the evolution of their academic preferences and how they take into account information about their abilities in different subjects. The second chapter describes the results of an experiment studying income allocation preferences. We show that, behind the veil of ignorance, individuals largely favor greater inequalities when they are also more efficient. But when these inequalities do appear concretely, a quarter of the subjects prefer to reduce the amount allocated to the richest, even if this does not improve anyone's situation. The third chapter investigates how managers' distributional preferences affect the distribution of wages, based on survey data and an experiment. We show that managers have normative distributional preferences and are willing to pay to implement them. The fourth chapter analyzes the results of an online experiment on ethnic discrimination in the United States and Germany. We compare the characteristics of ethnic favoritism within each country. We show that disclosing information about the economic success of ethnic minorities reduces discriminatory behavior by the ethnic majority. However, this information may increase distrust between two people from the same minority.

In the Funding section, the grant number from the funder European Research Council is missing. The correct funding information is as follows: This research was funded by CEPREMAP and the European Research Council. Yann Algan received financial support for this work from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program under European Research Council Consolidator Grant no. 647870. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

This dissertation aims to explore the link between institutions, gender and politics. It seeks to answer three questions: Can institutions undo gender norms? Would institutions be more egalitarian if they were led by women? Why are women absent from positions of power? The first chapter of this dissertation aims to explore the role of institutions in creating gender norms. The norm studied is that a woman must earn less than her husband. Using, the division of Germany as a natural experiment, we show that East German egalitarian institutions undid gender. After reunification, an East German woman can earn more than her husband without increasing her hours of domestic work, risking divorce or withdrawing from the labor market. In contrast, in West Germany, these behaviors are still observable.The second chapter examines whether institutions would be more egalitarian with women in charge. In particular, we investigate whether female politicians have the same priorities as their male colleagues. The context studied is the French Parliament during the period 2001-2017. By combining text analysis methods with exogenous variations in the gender of politicians, this chapter shows that, relative to their male colleagues, female politicians in the National Assembly are more advocates for women in the population. The issue where gender differences in parliamentary activity are most pronounced is precisely that of gender equality, followed by issues related to children and health. Men are more active on military issues. We show that these differences stem from the individual interests of legislators. Finally, we replicate these results in the Senate by exploiting the introduction of a reform that imposed parity.The third chapter looks at the reasons behind the under-representation of women in positions of power. It seeks to determine whether, in a context where politicians are predominantly men, the "incumbency bonus" in elections reduces the number of women elected. The context studied is that of municipalities of less than 1000 inhabitants in France. We show that, contrary to what one might expect, when politicians are not eligible for re-election, the share of women elected does not increase. This is because it is more difficult for a woman to replace a woman than to replace a man.

The draft reform of the French pension system, unveiled last July, should replace the notions of legal retirement age by a pivotal age, evolving according to the life expectancy of the generations. We have already seen to what extent this question of the retirement age was the subject of strong positions, reflecting the symbolic importance of this transition in our society. However, the economic literature highlights both negative and positive impacts of retirement, depending on the national context and the situation of the people concerned. This ambivalence about retirement is reflected in subjective evaluations of well-being. Moreover, retirement does little or nothing to erase social differences in the evaluation of one's well-being: those who are most satisfied before retirement are also most satisfied after retirement, even if in certain areas, particularly health, the gap between social groups tends to narrow with the passage to retirement. Because of the place occupied by work in the construction of people's social position, retirement can also be a time for questioning their social usefulness, when certain work-related sociability ties become weakened. We observe such effects in the French case, but they remain weak for people under 70, and even weaker if, like a third of retirees in this age group, the person is involved in volunteer activities. Painful questions about social usefulness or feelings of loneliness are more of a problem in the fourth age, from 80 onwards.

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi- experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in London, Paris, and Berlin during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. We show that hosting the Olympics increases subjective well-being of the host city's residents during the event, particularly around the times of the opening and closing ceremonies. However, we do not _nd much evi- dence for legacy e_ects. Estimating residents' implicit willingness-to-pay for the event, we do not _nd that it was worth it for London alone, but a modest wellbeing impact on the rest of the country would make hosting worth the costs.

Social scientists have provided empirical evidence that "gender trumps money", meaning that gender norms can be more powerful than economic rationality in shaping daily arrangements between spouses. In particular, when they deviate from the "male breadwinner" norm, women react by "doing gender", i.e. overplaying their feminine role by increasing the number of housework hours that they accomplish. The risk of divorce also increases when a woman earns more than her husband. This paper shows that, however powerful, these norms are cultural and can be trumped by institutions. We use the 41-year division of Germany as a natural experiment and look at differences between East and West Lander in terms of gender behavior after the German reunification. As most countries of the socialist bloc, the former GDR had designed institutions that were much more gender equalizing than their counterpart in the former FRG. We show that these institutions have created a culture that keeps inuencing behavior up to the current period. In particular, East Germany differs from West Germany in the sense that a woman can earn more than her husband without "doing gender" and without putting her marriage at risk.

Hosting the Olympic Games costs billions of taxpayer dollars. Following a quasi-experimental setting, this paper assesses the intangible impact of the London 2012 Olympics, using a novel panel of 26,000 residents in London, Paris, and Berlin during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. We show that hosting the Olympics increases subjective well-being of the host city's residents during the event, particularly around the times of the opening and closing ceremonies. However, we do not find much evidence for legacy effects. Estimating residents' implicit willingness-to-pay for the event, we do not find that it was worth it for London alone, but a modest well-being impact on the rest of the country would make hosting worth the costs.

Is retirement good for your health? We complement previous studies by exploring the effect of retirement on unexpected health evolution. Using panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (2001-2014), we construct measures of the mismatch between individual expected and actual health evolution (hereafter “health shocks”). In our approach, reverse causation running from health shocks to retirement is highly unlikely, because we look at shocks that happen after retirement, and those shocks are, by definition, unanticipated. We find that retirement decreases the probability of negative shocks (by approximately 16% to 24% for men and 14% to 23% for women) while increasing the likelihood of positive shocks (by 9% to 14% for men and 10% to 13% for women). This result is robust to the use of different lead-lag structures and of alternative measures of health change. Our findings are thus consistent with a positive impact of retirement on health.

Using a choice experiment in the lab, we assess the relative importance of different attitudes to income inequality. We elicit subjects’ preferences regarding pairs of payoff distributions within small groups, in a firm-like setting. We find that distributions that satisfy the Pareto-dominance criterion attract unanimous suffrage: all subjects prefer larger inequality provided it makes everyone weakly better off. This is true no matter whether payoffs are based on merit or luck. Unanimity only breaks once subjects’ positions within the income distribution are fixed and known ex-ante. Even then, 75% of subjects prefer Pareto-dominant distributions, but 25% of subjects engage in money burning at the top in order to reduce inequality, even when it does not make anyone better off. A majority of subjects embrace a more equal distribution if their own income or overall efficiency is not at stake. When their own income is at stake and the sum of payoffs remains unaffected, 20% of subjects are willing to pay for a lower degree of inequality.

Is retirement good for your health? This article explores the impact of retirement on unexpected health evolutions. Using data from the annual Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (2001-2014), we construct measures of the mismatch between each person’s expected and actual health evolution (hereafter, “health shocks”). We find that after retirement, the probability of negative shocks decreases and the likelihood of positive health shocks increases, for both genders. These shocks translate into variations of life satisfaction in the same direction (i.e. unexpected positive health shocks increase life satisfaction). Other indicators of mental and physical health taken from the SF-36 vary in the same way, i.e. improve unexpectedly after retirement. By definition, health shocks are immune to the problem of reverse causality that could run from health to retirement. Hence, our findings are consistent with a positive impact of retirement on health.

The Yellow Vests movement has introduced many questions about territorial inequalities into the public debate. This Note aims to analyze the local determinants of discontent among a part of the population. We study five characteristics of local living conditions: employment, local taxation, private and public facilities, real estate, and associative ties. We measure the evolution of these dimensions within each commune over the last few years and analyze their predictive power on three symptoms of discontent: the mobilization of the Gilets jaunes, the variation of the abstention rate during the presidential elections, as well as the discontent declared by the citizens.

In France, temporary institutionalization solutions for dependent elders have been encouraged since the early 2000s. They are targeting patients who are maintained at home, but may need temporary solutions to adjust the constraints of caregivers, e.g. to facilitate transitions between several informal care providers or to allow informal caregivers to leave for holidays. However, the influence of these solutions on dependent elders and their caregivers has not been explored yet. We use French longitudinal data (REAL.FR, 686 elders and their primary caregivers followed between 2000 and 2006) to explore the impact of institution placement on the wellbeing of both Alzheimer's disease patients and their primary informal caregivers. The data distinguishes permanent placements in institution from temporary stays. Using fixed-effect models, we quantify the change in patients' quality of life and caregivers' burden of care following the placement of patients. We find that permanent and temporary stays are associated with a decrease in informal caregivers' burden. However, only permanent stays lead to an improvement of patients' quality of life. Hence, taken together, the results suggest that while long-run placements may maximize the wellbeing of all the members of a household (patient and caregiver), this is not necessarily the case of short-term placements.

This paper argues that the socialist episode in East Germany, which constituted a radical experiment in gender equality in the labor market and other instances, has left persistent tracks on gender norms. We focus on one of the most resilient and pervasive gender gaps in modern societies: mathematics. Using the German division as a natural experiment, we show that the underperformance of girls in math is sharply reduced in the regions of the former GDR, in contrast with those of the former FRG. We show that this East–West difference is due to girls’ attitudes, confidence and competitiveness in math, and not to other confounding factors, such as the difference in economic conditions or teaching styles across the former political border. We also provide illustrative evidence that the gender gap in math is smaller in European countries that used to be part of the Soviet bloc, as opposed to the rest of Europe. The lesson is twofold: (1) a large part of the pervasive gender gap in math is due to social stereotypes. (2) institutions can durably modify these stereotypes.

Using a choice-experiment in the lab, we look at preferences over pairs of income distributions within small groups in a firm-like setting. Is one type of distribution capable of attracting votes unanimously? It turns out that Pareto-dominance is the most important choice criterion: in binary choices over two distributions, all subjects prefer larger inequality when it makes everyone weakly better off. This is true,no matter whether income distribution is based on merit or luck. Unanimity only breaks once subjects’ positions within the income distribution are fixed and known ex-ante. However, even then, 75% subjects prefer Pareto-dominant distributions. This suggests that efficiency motives are of primary importance, more so than the origin of inequality.

This thesis examines the impact of institutions on worker behavior and job quality. The first two chapters use subjective data to assess the impact of employment policies on job quality in a way that takes into account a broader range of relevant working conditions than the existing literature. The first chapter shows that a decrease in unemployment insurance reduces workers' job satisfaction by causing them to accept poorer working conditions. The second chapter shows that the effects of partial job protection on layoffs improve the sense of job security for protected workers, but at the cost of negative externalities for other workers. The third chapter provides new evidence on how institutions affect gender norms by examining women's labor market and marital behavior. Drawing on the 41-year period of Germany's division, we show that the gender-friendly institutions of the GDR created a culture that undid the norm that the man is the primary provider in the household. In contrast, this norm is still prevalent in the former West Germany.

This paper argues that the socialist episode in East Germany, which constituted a radical experiment in gender equality in the labor market and other instances, has left persistent tracks on gender norms. We focus on one of the most resilient and pervasive gender gaps in modern societies: mathematics. Using the German division as a natural experiment, we show that the underperformance of girls in math is sharply reduced in the regions of the former GDR, in contrast with those of the former FRG. We show that this East-West difference is due to girls' attitudes, confidence and competitiveness in math, and not to other confounding factors, such as the difference in economic conditions or teaching styles across the former political border. We also provide illustrative evidence that the gender gap in math is smaller in European countries that used to be part of the Soviet bloc, as opposed to the rest of Europe. The lesson is twofold: (1) a large part of the pervasive gender gap in math is due to social stereotypes. (2) institutions can durably modify these stereotypes.

The first chapter documents a key parameter for understanding the housing market: the elasticity of housing supply in French urban areas. We show that this elasticity can be understood in two ways by considering intensive and extensive housing supply. Thanks to a large amount of new data collected and an original estimation strategy, this first chapter estimates and decomposes the two elasticities. The second chapter is devoted to the possibilities offered by Big Data to study the French rental housing market. By exploiting online data from December 2015 to June 2017 and comparing these data to traditional administrative data, we show that the internet provides data to accurately track local housing markets. The third chapter focuses on the discrimination of women in politics. It exploits a natural experiment, the 2015 French departmental elections in which, for the first time in the history of French elections, candidates had to run in mandatorily mixed pairs. Using the fact that the order of appearance of candidates on a ballot was determined by alphabetical order and showing that this rule does not seem to have been used strategically by the parties, we show on the one hand that the position of women on the ballot is random, and on the other hand, that right-wing pairings for which the name of the female candidate is in the first position on the ballot receive an average of 1.5 percentage points less votes.

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France is plagued by existential doubts about its social model. The promise of a society that guarantees everyone the right to happiness is slipping away, and the proposed remedies often seem worse than the evil they are intended to combat. This book presents a picture of a society that is questioning its future, and aims to propose a diagnosis and explore avenues of reform through the proposals of the most eminent researchers in economics, brought together under the leadership of Philippe Askenazy, Daniel Cohen and Claudia Senik. Analyzing the different facets of the social question, the book deals with the main themes that concern public opinion: gender inequality, the fight against discrimination in hiring, the fight against obesity, the link between liberalization and growth, and the reform of the welfare state.

See: https://editionsdesequateurs.fr/Recherche/Essais/SEPTVOIXSURLEBONHEUR.

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While there is now something of a consensus in the economics of happiness literature that income comparisons to others help determine subjective well-being, debate continues over the relative importance of own and reference-group income, in particular in research on the Easterlin paradox. The variety of results in this domain have produced some scepticism regarding happiness analysis, and in particular with respect to the measurement of reference-group income. We here use data from an original Internet survey in Japan to compare the relative-income results from happiness regressions to those from hypothetical-choice experiments. This kind of validation of experienced utility via direct comparison with decision utility remains rare in this literature.

In my dissertation, I use recent methods of applied microeconometrics to assess the impacts of major events (Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Olympic Games), infrastructure (urban land use, wind turbines), and institutions in educational systems) on individual well-being, health, and behavior. Throughout my papers, I use longitudinal household data, in part merged with highly detailed spatial data, while paying particular attention to identifying causal effects.

This thesis investigates how intra- and inter-group inequality affects consumer behavior and welfare via social comparison effects. The goal is to better understand a number of social phenomena that have been largely neglected by classical consumer theory. For example, to what extent do visible determinants of social identity such as ethnic group or caste affect household consumption behavior? How can we understand the over-indebtedness of the poorest despite the persistent stagnation of their real income? Or does the consumption of luxury goods become necessary in more unequal societies and what does this tell us about the social limits of economic growth? To do so, the thesis incorporates important results from behavioral economics - in particular regarding social preferences and subjective evaluation of well-being - into the theory of consumers and savings. Chapter 1 develops a model of relative consumption that takes into account comparison effects over time and between goods. The following chapters identify these effects using representative population survey data and large databases obtained via web-scrapping methods. Chapter 2 focuses on housing debt in the United States when households are concerned about the relative size of their homes. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the social component of spending in India and its implication for malnutrition using standard and structural estimation methods.

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There is mixed evidence in the existing literature on whether children are associated with greater subjective well-being, with the correlation depending on which countries and populations are considered. We here provide a systematic analysis of this question based on three different datasets: two cross-national and one national panel. We show that the association between children and subjective well-being is positive only in developed countries, and for those who become parents after the age of 30 and who have higher income. We also provide evidence of a positive selection into parenthood, whereby happier individuals are more likely to have children.

We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom to the fourth income decile. But they do not last very long: the effects are gone within a year. These conclusions are based on a novel panel survey of 26,000 individuals who were interviewed during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013, i.e. before, during, and after the event. The results are robust to selection into the survey and to the number of medals won.

This study is an assessment of a programme of physical activity for the elderly. The programme offers to residents of retirement homes several physical activities designed to avoid falls, and light gym regimes. The programme is evaluated using a randomised controlled trial protocol in around 30 retirement homes in Europe. The results show a clear reduction in falls and a significant improvement in subjective health indicators. A cost-benefits analysis suggests that the introduction of such programmes could be very positive, thanks to the reduction of costs generated by falls by old people in residence, notwithstanding the benefits for their wellbeing.

This paper looks at the association between wage satisfaction and other people's pay, based on a matched employer–employee dataset. Three notions of reference wage appear to be being of particular importance: (i) the median wage level in one's firm, (ii) the level of wage of similar workers in the region, and (iii) the top 1% wage in one's firm. The first one triggers a signal effect, whereby all employees – especially young ones – whatever their relative position in the firm, are happier the higher the median wage in their firm, holding their own wage constant. The second and the third ones are sources of relative deprivation, i.e. workers’ satisfaction decreases with the gap between their own salary and these reference categories. These findings are based on objective measures of earnings as well as subjective declarations about wage satisfaction, awareness of other people's pay and reported income comparisons.

Présentation de l'éditeur : "This volume, arising from a PSE-CEPREMAP-DIMeco conference, includes contributions by the some of the best-known researchers in happiness economics and development economics, including Richard Easterlin, who gave his name to the 'Easterlin paradox' that GDP growth does not improve happiness over the long run. Many chapters underline the difficulty of increasing well-being in developing countries, including China, even in the presence of sustained income growth. This is notably due to the importance of income comparisons to others, adaptation (so that we get used to higher income), and the growing inequality of income. In particular, rank in the local income distribution is shown to be important, creating a beggar-thy-neighbour effect in happiness. Wealth comparisons in China are exacerbated by the gender imbalance, as the competition for brides creates a striking phenomenon of conspicuous consumption on the housing market. Policy has to be aware of these effects. This applies in particular to those who try to use self-reported subjective well-being in order to generate a 'social subjective poverty line', which is a key issue in developing countries. However, the news is not only bad from the point of view of developing countries. One piece of good news is that GDP growth often seems to go hand-in-hand with lower happiness inequality, and thereby reduces the risk of extreme unhappiness.".

This note presents the results of an evaluation of a physical activity program adapted to an elderly public. The program proposes several physical activities dedicated to residents in retirement homes around the prevention of falls and light gymnastics. The program was evaluated using a randomized trial protocol in about thirty retirement homes in Europe. The results show a net reduction in the prevalence of falls and a significant improvement in subjective measures of health. A cost-benefit analysis suggests that the generalization of such physical activity programs could be very positive thanks to the reduction of costs generated by falls of elderly people in residence. In addition, the benefits to the well-being of residents may in itself justify the development of such programs.

For 17 years, the social enterprise Siel Bleu has been developing and implementing physical activity programs adapted to the needs of elderly people in institutions, with the aim of promoting active ageing, preventing the risks and chronic diseases associated with ageing and supporting dependency. Siel Bleu works with 80,000 beneficiaries in 4,000 institutions and employs 400 people. In 2012, Siel Bleu, with the support of the European Union and Danone-Ecosystème, set up an evaluation protocol for an adapted physical activity program for residents of retirement homes: HAPPIER (Healthy Activity & Physical Program Innovations in Elderly Residences). The aim was to measure the impact of the program on the residents' quality of life, as well as their cognitive and physical faculties. The protocol also planned to evaluate the effect of the program on the professional quality of life of the nursing and support staff. The challenges of this protocol are linked to the growing importance of the care of elderly and dependent people by specialized residences, due to the increase in life expectancy, particularly in Europe. Faced with this new and massive phenomenon, the quality of life of elderly people living in institutions and the cost of their care are becoming major issues. In this context, we examine the hypothesis of a benefit of sports practice on the general moral and physical health of the elderly, as well as on their risk of falling, the latter being the most serious and most frequent source of health problems among the elderly.

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the “very unhappy” and the “perfectly happy.” Lower happiness inequality is found both between and within countries, and between and within individuals. Our cross-country regression results suggest that the extension of various public goods helps to explain this greater happiness homogeneity. This new stylized fact arguably comes as a bonus to the Easterlin paradox, offering a somewhat brighter perspective for developing countries.

My dissertation is composed of four separate chapters that share the same underlying topic of investigating how local conditions may affect labor supply, other behaviors, or such things as trust, social capital, subjective well-being (SWB), and reported happiness. The first chapter is entitled "Happy at Work? Employment and BES in Indonesia". In this chapter, I investigate whether working in the informal sector makes people worse off compared to those who work formally. The second chapter is titled after the results I find there: "When unemployment makes you unhappy, return to employment is faster". This second chapter estimates a model of unemployment duration that combines BES data to estimate unemployment duration as a function of BES loss when individuals entered unemployment. The third chapter, "Ethnic Diversity and Trust in Indonesia" links sources such as the census and survey data, and finds that ethnically diverse municipalities have lower levels of social capital and trust than more homogeneous municipalities. In the final chapter, I investigate whether income inequality at the municipal level is correlated with resident happiness, using Indonesian data. As a whole, these four chapters provide some conclusions about how local conditions-whether it is the industry composition of employment, the level of local inequality, or the ethnic composition-may affect people's happiness, their BES, and their labor market and other behaviors.

No summary available.

This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of similar affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus psychological and cultural factors. The latter turn out to be of non-negligible importance. In some countries, such as France, they are responsible for the best part of the country's unobserved idiosyncratic source of unhappiness. French natives are less happy than other Europeans, whether they live in France or outside. By contrast, immigrants are not less happy in France than they are elsewhere in Europe, but their happiness fall with the passage of time and generations. I show that these gaps in self-declared happiness have a real emotional counterpart and do not boil down to purely nominal differences.

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has dropped in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the "very unhappy" and the "perfectly happy". The extension of public amenities has certainly contributed to this greater happiness homogeneity. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, offering a somewhat brighter perspective for developing countries.

Does wealth accumulation impact subjective well-being? Within a country, household wealth has been shown to improve individual well-being by providing a safety net of protection against negative income shocks, by allowing current and expected consumption flows, and by its potential use as a collateral. At the aggregate level, direct evidence about the relationship between national wealth and happiness is almost non-existent, owing to data limitations and statistical identification problems. However, aggregate wealth impacts well-being indirectly, via positive channels, such as institutional quality and improvement in health, life expectancy, and education. Wealth also brings about negative environmental degradations and other damages. The stock of accumulated wealth is also likely to affect happiness indirectly, via its influence on the rate of GDP growth, because both the level of income flows and the rate of income growth have been shown to be factors of higher well-being.

No summary available.

No summary available.

This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of similar affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus psychological and cultural factors. The latter turn out to be of non-negligible importance. In some countries, such as France, they are responsible for the best part of the country's unobserved idiosyncratic source of unhappiness. French natives are less happy than other Europeans, whether they live in France or outside. By contrast, immigrants are not less happy in France than they are elsewhere in Europe, but their happiness fall with the passage of time and generations. I show that these gaps in self-declared happiness have a real emotional counterpart and do not boil down to purely nominal differences.

Our societies have made happiness a new idea, a constitutional principle, almost a duty. The happiness of the individual has become the supreme objective of political choices. But can we measure something as subjective and impalpable as happiness? For the past thirty years, economists have tried to meet this challenge. They have taken the gamble of measuring happiness as it is felt and declared by individuals themselves. Their investigation focuses on the role of wealth. Does money make people happy? Does growth make people happier? If not, should we opt for degrowth or at least measure well-being beyond GDP? This fascinating field of research allows us to understand why France, an objectively rich country, suffers from such a "happiness deficit".

This volume, arising from a PSE-CEPREMAP-DIMeco conference, includes contributions by the some of the best-known researchers in happiness economics and development economics, including Richard Easterlin, who gave his name to the 'Easterlin paradox' that GDP growth does not improve happiness over the long run. Many chapters underline the difficulty of increasing well-being in developing countries, including China, even in the presence of sustained income growth. This is notably due to the importance of income comparisons to others, adaptation (so that we get used to higher income), and the growing inequality of income. In particular, rank in the local income distribution is shown to be important, creating a beggar-thy-neighbour effect in happiness. Wealth comparisons in China are exacerbated by the gender imbalance, as the competition for brides creates a striking phenomenon of conspicuous consumption on the housing market. Policy has to be aware of these effects. This applies in particular to those who try to use self-reported subjective well-being in order to generate a 'social subjective poverty line', which is a key issue in developing countries. However, the news is not only bad from the point of view of developing countries. One piece of good news is that GDP growth often seems to go hand-in-hand with lower happiness inequality, and thereby reduces the risk of extreme unhappiness.

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the “very unhappy” and the “perfectly happy”. Lower happiness inequality is found both between and within countries, and between and within individuals. Our cross-country regression results argue that the extension of various public goods helps to explain this greater happiness homogeneity. This new stylised fact arguably comes as a bonus to the Easterlin paradox, offering a somewhat brighter perspective for developing countries.

Wages are an essential component of the standard of living. For the vast majority of workers, the amount of their wages is of considerable importance. How do different wage earners perceive both the wage they receive and the differences between them and others? The two major surveys from which this book is drawn reveal the relationships that workers have with their wages and the meaning they attribute to their pay. They focus on the subjective ways in which wages are perceived and on the criteria of fairness to which individuals refer in order to evaluate their amount. The same questionnaire, the "SalSa" survey ("salaries as seen by employees"), was administered to a sample of employees in private and public companies, on the one hand, and to a sample of employees in the civil service, on the other. These surveys show that, from the point of view of employees, pay is never simply a sum of money to satisfy needs. It is also a way of measuring the value of the work done, its recognition by society and therefore the value of the person himself, in himself but also in relation to others. This is why the way in which individuals know, apprehend and judge their remuneration and that of others is an essential element for understanding the procedures for determining and therefore negotiating wages, but also the meaning that individuals attribute to their work.

The French Republican model appears as a polar case among the different cultural integration models. Dating back to the French Revolution and the Third Republic, France has a long secular tradition imposing restrictive attitudes on the expression of religious and cultural identity in the public sphere. There are, however, growing concerns that this model, despite its claimed egalitarianism and universalism, fails to integrate the new immigrant minorities. The most illustrative example is the 2004 ruling against the display of conspicuous religious symbols in school, mainly targeted at Muslim schoolgirls who wished to wear the hijab. The main consequence of this refusal to acknowledge any minorities has been an inability to know whether the reality of equality matches the rhetoric of perfect cultural integration. While views on national identity and the integration model are very strongly held in France, the evidence base is rather weak. The goal of this chapter is to fill this gap.

French competitiveness clusters are the result of public decisions that lead to the establishment of internal strategies. Since 2006, the French government has been evaluating the effectiveness and interest of these structures, whose usefulness remains controversial.This research work focuses on the functioning and evolution of the economic model of competitiveness clusters. The methodology used is based on the analysis of the internal functioning of Cap Digital, a competitiveness cluster for digital content and services, based in Ile-de-France. The field approach allows us to understand the functioning of these associations and their interaction with SMEs, to know what their limits and difficulties are and to assume what actions are likely to be implemented to overcome these difficulties. Finally, based on the successes and limitations experienced by the Ile-de-France clusters, the focus is on the transposability of the cluster model to Morocco, in order to determine what are the essential elements to ensure the success of clusters in a different socio-economic context.

This paper looks at the association between wage satisfaction and different notions of reference wage, based on a matched employer-employee dataset. It shows that workers' satisfaction depends on other people's income in different ways. Relative income concerns are important, but we also find robust evidence of signal effects. For instance, workers are happier the higher the median wage in their firm, holding their own wage constant. This is true of all employees, whatever their relative position in the firm. This signal effect is stronger for young people and for women. These findings are based on objective measures of earnings as well as subjective declarations about wage satisfaction, awareness of other people's wage and reported income comparisons.

This thesis focuses on the use of self-assessments (of health, satisfaction. . . . on numerical or verbal scales) in economics. The first chapter uses well-being statements to study the extent of economic comparisons in India, particularly between castes. The results obtained confirm that comparisons have a deleterious effect on well-being. Furthermore, it appears that low-caste individuals are frustrated by the economic success of higher castes, while the latter do not derive any satisfaction from the situation of lower castes. The second chapter focuses on the extent to which individuals may differ in the way they use declarative scales to report their well-being. It proposes a new method to detect this declarative heterogeneity, and to correct for its effects. This method is used to check whether respondents differ in their use of the scale according to their income level. It appears that the richest respondents under-report variations in their well-being, which tends to bias the analyses strongly The third chapter studies the causes of declarative heterogeneity, focusing on self-reported health. It empirically evaluates the hypothesis that the interpretation of the scale depends on the distribution of health in the peer group. This hypothesis appears to be broadly valid. It also appears that other mechanisms may be at play. A final result is that if this declarative heterogeneity induces a bias, this bias remains limited in most situations of interest.

This paper looks at the association between wage satisfaction and different notions of reference wage, based on a matched employer-employee dataset. It shows that workers' satisfaction depends on otherpeople's income in different ways. Relative income concerns are important, but we also find robust evidence of signal effects. For instance, workers are happier the higher the median wage in their firm, holding their own wage constant. This is true of all employees, whatever their relative position in the firm. This signal effect is stronger for young people and for women. These findings are based on objective measures of earnings as well as subjective declarations about wage satisfaction, awareness of other people's wage and reported income comparisons.

No summary available.

This paper uses Japanese data which includes measures of self-declared satisfaction, reference-group income, and the direction and intensity of income comparisons. Relative to Europeans, the Japanese compare more to friends and less to colleagues, and compare their incomes more. The relationship between satisfaction and others' income is negative, and more negative for those who report greater income comparison intensity. A self-reported measure of others' income does better than cell-mean income in explaining satisfaction, and would arguably make a useful addition to many existing surveys.

This paper illustrates the sensitivity of political attitudes to the business cycle. It shows how the 2008 economic crisis has reshaped individual support for democracy and market liberalization in post-transition countries. Pro-reform attitudes have lost ground between 2006 and 2010 in Central and Eastern European countries that were hit by a negative economic shock. By contrast, they have increased in the CIS. Although on average, individual exposure to the crisis is associated with lower support to democracy and markets, it drives the demand for liberal reforms among groups of the population that were most excluded from the political-economic system in place, the youth particularly, in countries that lag behind in terms of liberalization and, where institutions are corrupt. We propose an interpretation of these evolutions in terms of learning and updating of beliefs.

The thesis contains six essays on immigration, relative income and redistribution. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 form a coherent whole. The analysis focuses on the effect of immigration and ethnic diversity on support for redistributive policy and the welfare state among the non-immigrant population. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are independent. In Chapter 5, I use information on immigrants' home country visits to test the model proposed by Falk and Knell (2004) on the correlation between job skills and immigrants' baseline income. In Chapter 6, I analyze differences in bargaining power within couples between East and West German women by estimating a collective household labor supply model. Finally, Chapter 7 presents a study of the effect of marital satisfaction on the probability of separation.

Our work focuses on how the former Soviet republics integrate into the world market. We show that a sudden exposure of these economies to external competition would threaten their industrial fabric and mutual trade. The relative price shock from trade liberalization would play a major role in this sequence. The danger of recession would be aggravated by the disintegration of the USSR as a trade and currency area. The objective of our work is to contribute to the reflection on how to minimize the costs of the transition of the ex-Soviet economies to the market. We consider the adoption of temporary protection mechanisms. We study the prospects for the re-establishment of a monetary order in the region. In particular, we attempt to assess the usefulness of a payments union associated with a common tariff system for all the republics.