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Is Happiness Contagious? Separating Spillover Externalities from the Group-Level Social Context

Author

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  • Tumen, Semih
  • Zeydanli, Tugba
Abstract
We investigate whether individuals feel happier when others around them are happier in broadly defined worker groups. This will be a formal test of spillovers in happiness. Answering this question requires a careful handling of the reflection problem, as it may not be possible to separate the endogenous spillover effects from contextual effects unless an appropriately designed identification strategy is employed. Implementing such a strategy and using the 2008 release of the British Housing Panel Survey (BHPS), we show that the group-level happiness does not have a statistically significant endogenous effect on individual-level happiness in the Great Britain. We report, however, statistically significant contextual effects in various dimensions including age, education, employer status, and health. These results suggest that higher group-level happiness does not spill over to the individual level in neither negative nor positive sense, while the individual-level happiness is instead determined by social context (i.e., the group-level counterparts of certain observed covariates). We also test the relevance of the "Easterlin paradox" and find that our result regarding the effect of income on happiness -- controlling for social interactions effects -- is the group-level analogue of Easterlin's original results.

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  • Tumen, Semih & Zeydanli, Tugba, 2014. "Is Happiness Contagious? Separating Spillover Externalities from the Group-Level Social Context," MPRA Paper 53184, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:53184
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    Cited by:

    1. Sunitha Singh & Sowmya Kshtriya & Reimara Valk, 2023. "Health, Hope, and Harmony: A Systematic Review of the Determinants of Happiness across Cultures and Countries," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(4), pages 1-68, February.
    2. Semih Tumen & Tugba Zeydanli, 2014. "Day-of-the-Week Effects in Subjective Well-Being: Does Selectivity Matter?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 119(1), pages 139-162, October.
    3. Semih Tumen & Tugba Zeydanli, 2016. "Social interactions in job satisfaction," International Journal of Manpower, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 37(3), pages 426-455, June.
    4. Hang Fang & Ting Yu & Michael S Delgado & Qianheng Qian, 2024. "Infectious happiness in heterogeneous social networks: evidence from rural China," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 44(3), pages 1188-1195.
    5. John Knight & Ramani Gunatilaka, 2017. "Is Happiness Infectious?," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 64(1), pages 1-24, February.
    6. Povey, Richard, 2015. "The welfare economics of infectious happiness," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 1-3.
    7. Pascarn R. Dickinson & Philip S. Morrison, 2022. "Aversion to Local Wellbeing Inequality is Moderated by Social Engagement and Sense of Community," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 159(3), pages 907-926, February.
    8. Jackson, Jeremy, 2019. "Happy partisans and extreme political views: The impact of national versus local representation on well-being," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 192-202.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Happiness; spillover externalities; contextual effects; social ecologies; reflection problem; BHPS.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C31 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions; Social Interaction Models
    • C36 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Instrumental Variables (IV) Estimation
    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • D62 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Externalities
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being

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