CARMO DOS SANTOS, CA; (2013) Dimensions of Well-Being: Earnings, Happiness and Domestic Violence. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis looks at three important aspects of the well-being of individuals. The first chapter looks at earnings and tries to estimate earnings over the life course accounting for selection. It does so by being silent a priori about the relative productivity of those who stay out of work and instead lets the data speak. Data suggest that nonworkers are not always worse than workers, and it also suggests cohort effects are also important when lifecycle profiles do not follow the same people over the whole age range. This chapter also provides an economic model which partly explains how higher productivity individuals may leave the market earlier than low productivity ones. The second chapter looks at another dimension of well-being over the life course. It estimates age-happiness profiles and it focusses more specifically on the identification of linear age effects, in a life satisfaction equation which also includes linear cohort and period effects. As in the first chapter, this chapter also accounts for selective attrition. It finds that cohort effects and selection are important and an adequate account of them changes the age effect on happiness quite substantially. The third chapter looks at domestic violence and tries to find a measure of the cost it has for victims. This is an under-researched area in Economics due to the challenges it presents to the discipline: it questions some of the assumptions often made in the literature about cooperation and efficiency in households; it cannot be easily (if at all) inferred from market behaviour; and data are quite sensitive to gather. We have used a data set designed in the UK, which culminates happiness and income data, and find that costs of violence are often larger than what most households would be able to compensate victims for.

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