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 …