Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Does Happiness Affect Consumption and Savings Behavior?

Cahit Guven (University of Houston) has published a new study that looks into whether happiness affects consumption and saving behavior. Below is the abstract:

I examine the impact of happiness on consumption and savings behavior using data from the DNB Household Survey from the Netherlands and the German Socio-Economic Panel. Instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, the results suggest that happier people save more, spend less, and have a lower marginal propensity to consume. Happier people take more time for making decisions and have more control over expenditures; they expect a longer life and (accordingly) seem more concerned about the future than the present; they also expect less inflation in the future.

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