出版社：Suntory Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines
摘要：This paper explores a wide range of cross-country determinants of life
satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries. We
distinguish four groups of aggregate variables as potential determinants of
satisfaction: political, economic, institutional, and human development and
culture. We use ordered probit to investigate the importance of these variables
on individual life satisfaction and test the robustness of our results with
Extreme Bounds Analysis. The results show that only a small number of factors,
such as openness, business climate, postcommunism, the number of chambers in
parliament, Christian majority, and infant mortality robustly influence life
satisfaction across countries while the importance of many variables suggested
in the previous literature is not confirmed. This remains largely true when the
analysis splits national populations according to gender, income and political
orientation also.
