Christopher P Barrington-Leigh

arXiv2025

Are international happiness rankings reliable?

Global comparisons of wellbeing increasingly rely on survey questions that ask respondents to evaluate their lives, most commonly in the form of "life satisfaction" and "Cantril ladder" items. These measures underpin international rankings such as the World Happiness Report and inform policy initiatives worldwide, yet their comparability has not been established with contemporary global data. Using the Gallup World Poll, Global Flourishing Study, and World Values Survey, I show that the two question formats yield divergent distributions, rankings, and response patterns that vary across countries and surveys, defying simple explanations. To explore differences in respondents' cognitive interpretations, I compare regression coefficients from the Global Flourishing Study, analyzing how each question wording relates to life circumstances. While international rankings of wellbeing are unstable, the scientific study of the determinants of life evaluations appears more robust. Together, the findings underscore the need for a renewed research agenda on critical limitations to cross-country comparability of wellbeing.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

The econometrics of happiness: Are we underestimating the returns to education and income?

This paper describes a fundamental and empirically conspicuous problem inherent to surveys of human feelings and opinions in which subjective responses are elicited on numerical scales. The paper also proposes a solution. The problem is a tendency by some individuals -- particularly those with low levels of education -- to simplify the response scale by considering only a subset of possible responses such as the lowest, middle, and highest. In principle, this ``focal value rounding'' (FVR) behavior renders invalid even the weak ordinality assumption often used in analysis of such data. With ``happiness'' or life satisfaction data as an example, descriptive methods and a multinomial logit model both show that the effect is large and that education and, to a lesser extent, income level are predictors of FVR behavior. A model simultaneously accounting for the underlying wellbeing and for the degree of FVR is able to estimate the latent subjective wellbeing, i.e.~the counterfactual full-scale responses for all respondents, the biases associated with traditional estimates, and the fraction of respondents who exhibit FVR. Addressing this problem helps to resolve a longstanding puzzle in the life satisfaction literature, namely that the returns to education, after adjusting for income, appear to be small or negative. Due to the same econometric problem, the marginal utility of income in a subjective wellbeing sense has been consistently underestimated.

econ.EM↗