We examine the link between the welfare state and citizens'life satisfaction by using evidence from public health care services. By combining local level data on public health care, and individual level data on life satisfaction, we show that relatively high expenditures in health care have a positive e¤ect on individuals' life satisfaction in our data. We …nd some evidence for an "ends-against-themiddle" equilibrium (Epple and Romano, 1996) in the provision of public health care, where middle-income individuals prefer higher public expenditure than lowincome or high-income individuals. Further, our results indicate that valuation for health care depends on individual political orientation.

Perhaps the most common finding relating housing to the labour market is that high home-ownership rates are associated with higher unemployment. In contrast, recent micro-evidence suggests that homeowners have relatively favourable labour market outcomes. We explore the effect of home-ownership on unemployment exploiting a rental housing market deregulation reform which created exogenous variation in home-ownership across regions, allowing us to avoid the endogeneity problem in earlier studies. While home-owners are less likely to experience unemployment, an increase in the home-ownership rate causes unemployment to rise. Externalities arising from consumption reductions and increased job competition may explain the conflicting evidence.

No abstract

No abstract

We examine the relationship between output fluctuations and within-country variation in subjective well-being using country panels. We show that the deviation of output from trend, unlike trend growth, is positively associated with well-being. The explanatory power of the business cycle is found to be better than that of the level of output.