Subjective Well-Being, Income and Economic Margins

This paper uses the Swedish Level of Living Survey to study how satisfaction with living conditions and daily life covary with economic resources, in the cross-section and in a decade-long panel. We find that self-reported lack of economic margins is a powerful determinant of satisfaction, its magnitude being comparable even to that of marriage or cohabitation. In contrast, although income is positively associated with satisfaction, the relationship is less robust than for economic margins, and the estimated gradients vary substantially depending on the choice of satisfaction measure, income measure and model specification.