oes Cooperativeness Promote Happiness? Cross-country Evidence

Luigino Bruni () and Giovanni Ferri

No 107, Mo.Fi.R. Working Papers from Money and Finance Research group (Mo.Fi.R.) - Univ. Politecnica Marche - Dept. Economic and Social Sciences

Abstract: Why is the share of happy people higher in some countries than in their equally developed neighbors? We conjecture that the apparent contradiction might depend on a country's endowment of relational goods, which we proxy empirically with the extent of cooperativeness. Compiling an index of the importance of the cooperative sector, we test whether higher values of the index associate with more happiness controlling for countries' HDI and other control variables. Checking for endogeneity, we find support for our hypothesis and that support is stronger for more developed countries. This suggests that, indeed, relational goods might help tackle Easterlin's paradox.

Keywords: Cross-country evidence; Extent of the cooperative sector; Happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 P13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anc:wmofir:107

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