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Publications

The Welfare Consequences of Centralization: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in SwitzerlandJournal articleSarah Flèche, Review of Economics and Statistics, Volume 103, Issue 4, pp. 621–635, 2021

Many countries are reallocating tasks and powers to more central levels of government. To identify centralization’s welfare effects, I use a difference-in-differences design that relies on time and cross-cantonal variation in the implementation of centralization reforms in Switzerland. I find that centralization provokes significant decreases in residents’ life satisfaction. I identify one mechanism driving the effect, namely the procedural disutility that individuals experience from having less influence over the formulation of political decisions. This effect is largest among individuals with higher expected benefits from being involved in the political decision process, with detrimental effects on local political participation.

COVID-19, lockdowns and well-being: Evidence from Google TrendsJournal articleAbel Brodeur, Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche and Nattavudh Powdthavee, Journal of Public Economics, Volume 193, pp. 104346, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic and government intervention such as lockdowns may severely affect people’s mental health. While lockdowns can help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to population well-being. We use Google Trends data to test whether COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns implemented in Europe and America led to changes in well-being related topic search-terms. Using difference-in-differences and a regression discontinuity design, we find a substantial increase in the search intensity for boredom in Europe and the US. We also found a significant increase in searches for loneliness, worry and sadness, while searches for stress, suicide and divorce on the contrary fell. Our results suggest that people’s mental health may have been severely affected by the pandemic and lockdown.

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: Evidence from British cohort dataJournal articleSarah Flèche, Warn N. Lekfuangfu and Andrew E. Clark, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 181, pp. 290-311, 2021

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We here use two British birth-cohort datasets (the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS) to map out the time profile of the effect of childhood experiences on adult outcomes, including life satisfaction. We find that the effects of many aspects of childhood do not fade away over time but are rather remarkably stable. In both birth-cohorts, child non-cognitive skills are the strongest predictors of adult life satisfaction at all ages. Of these, emotional health is the strongest. Childhood cognitive performance is more important than good conduct in explaining adult life satisfaction in the earlier NCDS cohort, whereas this ranking is inverted in the more recent BCS.

Gender norms, fairness and relative working hours within householdsJournal articleSarah Flèche, Anthony Lepinteur and Nattavudh Powdthavee, Labour Economics, Volume 65, pp. 101866, 2020

Using data in the United States, UK and Germany, we show that women whose working hours exceed those of their male partners report lower life satisfaction on average. By contrast, men do not report lower life satisfaction from working more hours than their female partners. An analysis of possible mechanisms shows that in couples where the woman works more hours than the man, women do not spend significantly less time doing household chores. Women with egalitarian ideologies are likely to perceive this unequal division of labour as unfair, ultimately reducing their life satisfaction.

Child sleep and mother labour market outcomesJournal articleJoan Costa-Font and Sarah Flèche, Journal of Health Economics, Volume 69, Issue C, 2020

We show that sleep deprivation exerts strong negative effects on mothers’ labour market performance. To isolate variations in maternal sleep, we exploit unique variations in child sleep disruption using a UK panel dataset that follows mother-child pairs through time. We find that sleeping one hour less per night on average significantly decreases maternal labour force participation, the number of hours worked and household income. We identify one mechanism driving the effects, namely the influence of maternal sleep on selection into full-time versus part-time work. Increased schedule flexibility for mothers with sufficient tenure mitigates the negative effects of sleep deprivation.

Neighbors' Income, Public Goods, and Well‐BeingJournal articleAbel Brodeur and Sarah Flèche, Review of Income and Wealth, Volume 65, Issue 2, pp. 217-238, 2019

How does neighbors' income affect individual well‐being? Our analysis is based on rich U.S. local data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains information on where respondents live and their self‐reported well‐being. We find that the effect of neighbors' income on individuals' self‐reported well‐being varies with the size of the neighborhood included. In smaller areas such as ZIP codes, we find a positive relationship between median income and individuals' life satisfaction, whereas it is the opposite at the county, MSA, and state levels. We provide evidence that local public goods and local area characteristics such as unemployment, criminality, and poverty rates drive the association between satisfaction and neighbors' income at the ZIP code level. The neighbors' income effects are mainly concentrated among poorer individuals and are as large as one quarter of the effect of own income on self‐reported well‐being.

Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners?Journal articleSarah Flèche, Anthony Lepinteur and Nattavudh Powdthavee, AEA Papers and Proceedings, Volume 108, pp. 163-168, 2018

Constraints that prevent women from working longer hours are argued to be important drivers of the gender wage gap in the United States. We provide evidence that in couples where the wife's working hours exceed the husband's, the wife reports lower life satisfaction. By contrast, there is no effect on the husband's satisfaction. The results still hold when controlling for relative income. We argue that these patterns are best explained by perceived fairness of the division of household labor, which induces an aversion to a situation where the wife works more at home and on the labor market.

The Origins of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being over the Life CourseBookAndrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard, Powdthavee Nattavudh and George Ward, 2018-01, 336 pages, Princeton University Press, 2018

What makes people happy? Why should governments care about people’s well-being? How would policy change if well-being was the main objective? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human priorities and to promote public policy changes that are based on what really matters to people. Drawing on a uniquely comprehensive range of evidence from longitudinal data on over one hundred thousand individuals in Britain, the United States, Australia, and Germany, the authors consider the key factors that affect human well-being.The authors explore factors such as income, education, employment, family conflict, health, childcare, and crime—and their findings are not what we might expect. Contrary to received wisdom, income inequality accounts for only two percent or less of the variance in happiness across the population; the critical factors affecting a person’s happiness are their relationships and their mental and physical health. More people are in misery due to mental illness than to poverty, unemployment, or physical illness. Examining how childhood influences happiness in adulthood, the authors show that academic performance is a less important predictor than emotional health and behavior, which is shaped tremendously by schools, individual teachers, and parents. For policymakers, the authors propose new forms of cost-effectiveness analysis that places well-being at center stage.Groundbreaking in its scope and results, The Origins of Happiness offers all of us a new vision for how we might become more healthy, happy, and whole.

Do More of Those in Misery Suffer from Poverty, Unemployment or Mental Illness?Journal articleSarah Flèche and Richard Layard, Kyklos, Volume 70, Issue 1, pp. 27-41, 2017

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and mental illness. The largest proportion suffer from mental illness. Multiple regression shows that mental illness is not highly correlated with poverty or unemployment, and that it contributes more to explaining the presence of misery than is explained by either poverty or unemployment. This holds both with and without fixed effects.<br><small>(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)</small>

Economic Growth Evens Out Happiness: Evidence from Six SurveysJournal articleAndrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche and Claudia Senik, Review of Income and Wealth, Volume 62, Issue 3, pp. 405-419, 2016

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.