Search

A subjective well-being angle has emerged as an important new frontier to advance the understanding of the causes and consequences of migration. The purpose of this chapter is to organize and take stock of this emerging literature on the bi-directional relationship between migration and happiness by reviewing the available literature from a global perspective. The literature review covers both international migration and internal migration and considers the outcomes of various stakeholders (migrants, hosting communities, and family members left behind). The literature documents ample evidence that happiness plays an important role in migration decisions, with relatively unhappy people moving to happier places, even after accounting for standard predictors of migration. In some contexts, internal migrants experience a pre-migration happiness dip. Most international migrants gain happiness from migration, hosting populations tend to experience a mixed but small impact, and family members staying behind generally experience a positive impact on evaluative well-being but not emotional well-being. However, the outcomes are strongly context-dependent and important differences exist between individuals. The impact of migration is much smaller for internal migrants. Overall, the current evidence suggests that migration contributes to a happier world because of the generally positive effects on migrants and the marginal effects on hosting communities.

By conducting a meta-analysis of the empirical literature on the net employment effects of renewable energy, we explore the extent to which the reported net employment effects are driven by the applied methodology. We find that the reported conclusions on net employment effects are to a large extent driven by the methodology that is applied, where computable general equilibrium (CGE) and I/O methods that include induced effects and studies that consider only the near future in their study period (up to 2020) are generally less optimistic about net employment creation in the wake of the energy transition. In addition, we found that policy reports have a greater tendency to report a positive net employment effect than academic studies.

Immigrants in developed countries typically fail to assimilate in terms of subjective well-being, meaning that their happiness and life satisfaction do not substantially increase with their length of stay or across generations, and therefore their subjective well-being remains lower than that of natives. This contrasts with migrants’ own expectations and the predictions of straight-line assimilation theory, along with the general improvement of immigrants’ objective living conditions with their length of stay. Using European Social Survey data, we show that the subjective well-being assimilation of first-generation immigrants in developed European countries is impaired by the gradual development of less positive perceptions of the host country’s economic, political, and social conditions. These faltering societal perceptions particularly affect immigrants whose societal conditions strongly improved by migration and immigrants who arrived after childhood. Faltering societal perceptions continue to impair subjective well-being assimilation across generations. However, compared with natives, first-generation immigrants derive a subjective well-being advantage from their more positive societal perceptions. We attribute these findings to immigrants’ growing aspirations and expectations that follow from their habituation to better conditions in their host country and fewer (more) comparisons to inferior (better) conditions of the people in their home (host) country. Our findings suggest that delaying or decelerating the process of immigrants’ faltering societal perceptions is a promising pathway to improved subjective well-being assimilation and reduced frustration about their perceived lack of progress.

We conducted a field experiment to increase our understanding of lottery participation. Using representative data for the Netherlands, we find that lottery participation increased the happiness of participants before the draw. Winning a small prize had no effect on happiness. Our results indicate that people may not only care about the outcomes of the lottery, but also enjoy the game. Accordingly, we conclude that lottery play has a utility value in itself and part of the lottery ticket is consumed before the draw.

This study analyzes whether subjective well-being measures can explain variation in peaceful uprisings, in addition to the objective measures typically used in analyses of this type of events. Using data on uprisings and subjective well-being for 118 countries from 2007 to 2014 -- a period during which nonviolent conflict became increasingly prevalent -- the study finds evidence of a positive effect of life dissatisfaction on the incidence of peaceful uprising, but not its violent counterpart. This effect does not depend on the type of political regime, nor the stage of development, and, to a large extent, it reflects changes in perceived satisfaction with living standards and the ability to have a purposeful and meaningful life.

Despite the many negative aspects of life in cities, urban promises of economic prosperity, freedom and happiness have fuelled the imagination of generations of migrants, who have flocked to cities in search of a better life, invariably exaggerating the opportunities and neglected the potential disadvantages of their choice. This paper uses insights from psychological literature to better understand why people have such strong, positive and apparently overrated expectations about cities. We dwell into concepts of bounded rationality to describe the cognitive biases and heuristics affecting decision-making under uncertainty and apply them to the way individuals perceive and act upon the promises of urban life. By linking this literature to urban theory, we can better understand how individuals make their decisions about moving to and living in cities. We thereby offer an understanding of urbanisation and migration processes departing from economic rationality assumptions and explain the remarkable attractive force of cities throughout human history. Finally, we discuss the ways in which human biases in favour of city narratives and bright urban futures can be exploited by 'triumphalist' accounts of cities in policy and media, which neglect the embedded injustices and structural problems of urban life.

Can online social contacts replace the importance of real-life social connections in our pursuit of happiness? With the growing use of social network sites (SNSs), attention has been increasingly drawn to this topic. Our study empirically examines the effect of SNS use on happiness for different subgroups of young adults. More specifically, we examine whether the effect of SNSs on happiness is moderated by individual social capital, as measured in terms of frequency of social contacts and feelings of loneliness. Using Dutch data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS panel), we provide robust empirical evidence that there is, on average, no relationship between the amount of time spent on SNSs and happiness. However, we find a negative association between the numbers of hours spent on SNS and happiness for SNS users who feel socially disconnected and lonely. The results hold when we control for socio-demographic characteristics, trust, hours spent on other Internet sites and household income. Hence, SNSs are not a substitute for real-life social connections and, at most, complement them.

Overseas Chinese communities are an important determinant in the location choice of greenfield investments made by mainland Chinese multinational enterprises across European regions. Conceptually embedded in a relational approach, this effect is shown through an empirical analysis of an exhaustive set of investment projects across NUTS-1 regions in 26 European countries for the period 2003-2010. When controlling for endogeneity bias and the embeddedness of existing Chinese economic activity, we find that the importance of overseas communities in the location choices of Chinese firms is based on increased access to strategic information. Our results confirm that the relationship between the size of an overseas Chinese community and the probability of Chinese investment is stronger for communities hosting newer generations of Chinese migrants; in addition, they partially corroborate that this relationship is stronger when the education level of the community’s Chinese migrants is higher. Our findings are particularly robust in the context of knowledge-intensive sectors and high value-added functions.

A central question in strategic management is why some firms perform better than others. One approach to addressing this question empirically is to decompose the variance in firm-level profitability into firm, industry, location, and year components. Although it is well established that data sparseness in variance decomposition studies can lead to overestimating particular variance components, little attention has been paid to sample size requirements in strategic management studies that have examined the nature of differences in firm profitability. We conduct a meta-regression and variance decomposition study and conclude that the variation in the results from previous studies is driven—to a considerable extent—by the number of observations per group within a component. Based on these findings, we draw conclusions regarding the validity and reliability of previo us variance decomposition studies and provide implications for current debates in the strategic management literature.

Using a newly assembled, consistent and disaggregated dataset (12 goods and 7 services) on internal and bilateral trade for 25 European countries, we analyse the difference between trade in goods and services. The measurement of both trade in goods and trade in services is improved over earlier research, allowing us to compare trade in goods and services in a coherent and systematic way. First, our dataset is made consistent with the domestic demand and production and the total exports and imports at the sector and product level. Second, we explicitly control for re-exports. We find that, although goods are more often bilaterally traded than services, the volume of bilateral trade in services does not attenuate less with distance than the volume of bilateral trade in goods.

Using data for 28 European countries for the 2008-2012 period, we examine whether employed individuals are affected by the economic crisis. We provide robust evidence that unfavourable macroeconomic conditions are negatively associated with the life satisfaction of employees. In addition, we find that higher levels of regional unemployment and inflation are predominantly associated with lower levels of life satisfaction for employees who are in a bad financial situation or who expect that their future financial situation will be worse. By contrast, employed people who do well financially and who have good prospects are not affected by the crisis.

In the modern economy, cities are assumed to be in fierce competition over attracting foreign investments in leading sectors of the world economy. Despite the rich theoretical discourse on these 'wars', it remains unclear which territories are competing with each other over which types of investments Combining insights from international economics, international business, and urban systems literature, we develop an indicator to measure revealed competition between territories for investments based on the overlap of investment portfolios of regions. Taking competition for greenfield investments between European regions as a test subject, we identify competitive market segments, derive the competitive threat a region faces from other regions, the competitive threat regions pose to other regions, and the most important market segments in which regions compete. We show that European regions with similar locational endowments pose a fiercer competitive thre at to one another. In addition, regions that are sufficiently large and distinctive, face the smallest average competitive threat from all other regions.

Empirical studies in spatial economics have shown that agglomeration economies may be a source of the uneven distribution of economic activities and economic growth across cities and regions. Both localization and urbanization economies are hypothesized to foster agglomeration and growth, but recent meta-analyses of this burgeoning body of empirical research show that the results are ambiguous. Recent overviews show that this ambiguity is fuelled by measurement issues and heterogeneity in terms of scale of time and space, aggregation, growth definitions, and the functional form of the models applied. Alternatively, in this paper, we argue that ambiguity may be due to a lack of research on firm-level performance in agglomerations. This research is necessary because the theories that underlie agglomeration economies are microeconomic in nature. Hierarchical or multilevel modeling, which allows micro levels and macro levels to be modeled simultaneously, is becoming an increasingly common practice in the social sciences. As illustrated by detailed Dutch data on firm-level productivity, employment growth and firm survival, we argue that these approaches are also suitable for reducing the ambiguity surrounding the agglomeration-firm performance relationship and for addressing spatial, sectoral and cross-level heterogeneity.