Tella, R. D., MacCulloch, R. J., &Oswald, A. J. (2003). The macroeconomics of happiness. Review of Economics and Statistics, 85(4), 809-827.
We show that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970s to the 1990s. Happiness equations are monotonically increasing in income, and have similar structure in different countries. Second, movements in reported well-being are correlated ...