Charles Henri DiMaria
Laboratoire d’Economie d’Orl´eans (LEO); Institut national de la statistique et des ´etudes´economiques du Grand-Duch´e du Luxembourg (STATEC).
Chiara Peroni
Institut national de la statistique et des ´etudes ´economiques du Grand-Duch´e du Luxembourg (STATEC)
Francesco Sarracino
Institut national de la statistique et des ´etudes ´economiques du Grand-Duch´e du Luxembourg (STATEC); Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR), National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russia); GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany)
Abstract
This article is about the link between people’s subjective well-being, defined as an evaluation of one’s own life, and productivity. Our aim is to test the hypothesis that subjective well-being contributes to productivity using a two step approach: first, we establish whether subjectivewell-being can be a candidate variable to study Total Factor Productivity; second, we assess how much subjective well-being contributes to productivity at aggregate level through efficiency gains. We adopt Data Envelopment Analysis to compute total factor productivity and efficiency indices using European Social Survey and AMECO data for 20 European countries. Results show that subjective well-being is an input and not an output to production.
Keywords
productivity, subjective well-being, TFP, efficiency gains, life satisfaction, economic growth, DEA.
JEL codes
E23, I31, O47
