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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.