The Wellbeing Reading List News: January 2022
View the original WWP Wellbeing Reading List HERE
We asked the World Wellbeing Panel (WWP) panelists to nominate 5 relevant papers in the wellbeing literature that they believed should be added to our Wellbeing Reading List. The nominations are in, and from now until the end of 2022, we will disclose the 24 most-nominated papers.
Papers will be revealed two at a time, starting with those that had the fewest nominations and using the number of citations in 2021 (according to Google Scholar) when there are ties.
The Wellbeing Reading List is managed by WWP panelist Daniela Andrén (Örebro University) and the managing committee of the World Wellbeing Panel.
Please use the hashtag #WellbeingReadingList on social media to share and comment on the papers.
January 2022
The 22nd paper in the WRL list was written by the recently departed Ed Diener, a doyen of the wellbeing literature, the World Wellbeing Panel honored his contributions in the July 2021 World Wellbeing Panel (WWP) survey: “Is happiness a way of life, shared with others?” (see here)
Diener, E (1984). Subjective Well-Being. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 542–575.
Total google scholar citations: 5
Professor Diener is one of the best-known happiness scholars and his article was his first paper in subjective wellbeing. The paper reviews the literature since 1967 and ends by setting the priorities for future research, notably emphasizing the need to combine data with theoretical prepositions and to integrate the different theories.
The 21st article in the list is:
Luechinger, S. (2009). Valuing air quality using the life satisfaction approach. The Economic Journal, 119, 482–515.
Total google scholar citations: 570
This paper was among the first to use a life satisfaction questions from survey data, combined with administrative data on pollution, to estimate the monetary value of a non-market good, air quality. Luechinger suggested that because the life satisfaction data contain useful information on individuals’ preferences and hedonic experience of public goods, the life satisfaction approach expands economists’ toolbox in the area of non-market valuation, complementing the methods to monetarize non-market good for cost benefit analysis and policy design.
The WWP December 2021 survey was in the WELLBY cost-benefit methodology (see here).
View the BEST/World Wellbeing Panel page HERE.