IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hka/wpaper/2013-013.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Happy Peasants and Frustrated Achievers? Agency, Capabilities, and Subjective Well-Being

Author

Listed:
  • Carol Graham

    (The Brookings Institution)

  • Milena Nikolova

    (University of Maryland, College Park)

Abstract

We explore the relationship between agency and hedonic and evaluative dimensions of well-being, using data from the Gallup World Poll. We posit that individuals emphasize one well-being dimension over the other, depending on their agency. We test four hypotheses including whether: (i) positive levels of well-being in one dimension coexist with negative ones in another; and (ii) individuals place a different value on agency depending on their positions in the well-being and income distributions. We find that: (i) agency is more important to the evaluative well-being of respondents with more means; (ii) negative levels of hedonic well-being coexist with positive levels of evaluative well-being as people acquire agency; and (iii) both income and agency are less important to well-being at highest levels of the well-being distribution. We hope to contribute insight into one of the most complex and important components of well-being, namely, people's capacity to pursue fulfilling lives.

Suggested Citation

  • Carol Graham & Milena Nikolova, 2013. "Happy Peasants and Frustrated Achievers? Agency, Capabilities, and Subjective Well-Being," Working Papers 2013-013, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    • Handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2013-013
    Note: MIP
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Graham_Nikolova_2013_happy-peasants.pdf
    File Function: First version, April 2013
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Angus Deaton, 2005. "Measuring Poverty in a Growing World (or Measuring Growth in a Poor World)," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(1), pages 1-19, February.
    2. De Neve, Jan-Emmanuel & Oswald, Andrew J., 2012. "Estimating the influence of life satisfaction and positive affect on later income using sibling fixed-effects," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 51523, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Milena Nikolova & Carol Graham, 2014. "Employment, late-life work, retirement, and well-being in Europe and the United States," IZA Journal of European Labor Studies, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 3(1), pages 1-30, December.
    2. Pedro Mateu & Enrique Vásquez & Javier Zúñiga & Franklin Ibáñez, 2020. "Happiness and poverty in the very poor Peru: measurement improvements and a consistent relationship," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 54(3), pages 1075-1094, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:wsr:wpaper:y:2012:i:083 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Alessandro Olper & Johan Swinnen, 2013. "Mass Media and Public Policy: Global Evidence from Agricultural Policies," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 27(3), pages 413-436.
    3. Alvaredo, Facundo & Bourguignon, François & Ferreira, Francisco H. G. & Lustig, Nora, 2023. "Seventy-five Years of Measuring Income Inequality in Latin America," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 13157, Inter-American Development Bank.
    4. Picarelli, Nathalie, 2016. "Who really benefits from export processing zones? Evidence from Nicaraguan municipalities," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 318-332.
    5. Charles Meth, 2006. "What was the poverty headcount in 2004 and how does it compare to recent estimates by van der Berg et al?," SALDRU Working Papers 1, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    6. Drouvelis, Michalis & Powdthavee, Nattavudh, 2015. "Are happier people less judgmental of other people's selfish behaviors? Experimental survey evidence from trust and gift exchange games," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 111-123.
    7. Kraay, Aart, 2004. "When is growth pro-poor? Cross-country evidence," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3225, The World Bank.
    8. Denisova, Irina & Eller, Markus & Frye, Timothy & Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina, 2012. "Everyone hates privatization, but why? Survey evidence from 28 post-communist countries," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 44-61.
    9. Markus Brückner & Antonio Ciccone, 2011. "Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 79(3), pages 923-947, May.
    10. Francis Teal, 2006. "Consumption and welfare in Ghana in the 1990s," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(7), pages 1252-1269.
    11. Kucera, David, & Chataignier, Anne., 2005. "Labour developments in dynamic Asia : what do the data show?," ILO Working Papers 993843703402676, International Labour Organization.
    12. Sanjay Reddy & Rahul Lahoti & Arjun Jayadev, 2015. "The global consumption and income project: An introduction and preliminary findings," WIDER Working Paper Series 003, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    13. Andrew E. Clark, 2015. "SWB as a Measure of Individual Well-Being," Working Papers halshs-01134483, HAL.
    14. Carol Graham, 2014. "Late-life work and well-being," IZA World of Labor, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), pages 107-107, November.
    15. Michiel Slag & Martijn J. Burger & Ruut Veenhoven, 2019. "Did the Easterlin Paradox apply in South Korea between 1980 and 2015? A case study," International Review of Economics, Springer;Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRS), vol. 66(4), pages 325-351, December.
    16. Pottier, Antonin, 2022. "Expenditure elasticity and income elasticity of GHG emissions: A survey of literature on household carbon footprint," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 192(C).
    17. Calderón, César & Fuentes, J. Rodrigo, 2014. "Have business cycles changed over the last two decades? An empirical investigation," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 98-123.
    18. Dang, Hai-Anh H. & Serajuddin, Umar, 2020. "Tracking the sustainable development goals: Emerging measurement challenges and further reflections," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    19. Quibria, M.G., 2020. "Poverty and Policy in the Developing World: Before and After the Pandemic," MPRA Paper 104240, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 15 Oct 2020.
    20. Chattopadhyay, Amit K. & Mallick, Sushanta K., 2007. "Income distribution dependence of poverty measure: A theoretical analysis," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 377(1), pages 241-252.
    21. Mathias Silva, 2023. "Parametric models of income distributions integrating misreporting and non-response mechanisms," AMSE Working Papers 2311, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    agency; capabilities; subjective well-being;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality
    • G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • O5 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2013-013. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jennifer Pachon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mfichus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.