THE HALF-LIFE OF HAPPINESS: HEDONIC ADAPTATION IN THE SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING OF POOR SLUM DWELLERS TO THE SATISFACTION OF BASIC HOUSING NEEDS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Galiani, Sebastian; Gertler, Paul J.; Undurraga, Raimundo
• 署名单位: University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Universidad de Chile
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvx042
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 1189-1233
• 关键词: income; economists; poverty; utility; HEALTH; scales

摘要

Subjective well-being may not improve in step with increases in material well-being due to hedonic adaptation, a psychological process that attenuates the long-term emotional impact of a favorable or unfavorable change in circumstances. As a result, people's degree of happiness eventually returns to a stable reference level. We use a multicountry field experiment to examine the impact on subjective measures of well-being of the provision of improved housing to extremely poor populations in order to test whether they exhibit hedonic adaptation when their basic housing needs are met. After 16 months, we find that subjective perceptions of well-being improve substantially for recipients of improved housing but that, after, on average, eight additional months, 60% of that gain has dissipated. Extrapolation achieved through estimation of a structural model of hedonic adaptation suggests that the decay rate of the treatment effect is 20% per month. As a result, after 28 months of treatment exposure, we forecast that the entire treatment effect will have disappeared. (JEL: D0, I31)