Cultural diversity and subjective well-being

Abstract

This paper analyses the impact that diversity has on life satisfaction of people living in England. In England, and in many other countries, local communities are becoming more diverse in terms of country of birth, ethnicity and religion of residents, with unclear consequences on the well-being of people living in these communities. The results suggest that white British people living in diverse areas have on average lower levels of life satisfaction than those living in areas where diversity is low, while there is no correlation on average between diversity and life satisfaction for non-white British people and foreign born.

Racial diversity, immigrants and the well-being of residents: evidence from US counties

“…However, Longhi (2014) finds that White British people living in racially diverse areas tend to report lower levels of life satisfaction than those living in areas where diversity is low, while she finds little evidence that diversity affects life satisfaction of non-White British people and foreign-born people. Thus, evidence seems to be somewhat mixed among the existing studies on the link association between immigration/ethnic diversity and residents' well-being.…”

Bringing Happiness Into the Study of Migration and Its Consequences: What, Why, and How?

“…Subjective well-being evaluations can estimate the overall outcome of immigration for the host country's natives, as natives' life evaluations implicitly capture and weigh the various costs and benefits of migration. Most initial evidence suggests that immigration and the related ethnic and cultural diversity generally have a positive though marginal impact on the well-being of the native population in various European countries (e.g., Akay, Constant, Giulietti, & Guzi, 2017), but this may not hold in every context or for more local communities (Longhi, 2014). Another stakeholder group for whom happiness has remained unstudied but that deserves attention is the broad population of the sending society; that is, equivalent to the notion of a brain gain/drain, the existence of a "happiness gain/drain" merits exploration.…”

Local-level immigration and life satisfaction: The EU enlargement experience in England and Wales

“…Since the BHPS follows the same people over time, we can estimate fixed effects regression models that take account of the potentially confounding impact of time-invariant individual characteristics. Our paper contributes to the nascent literature on the effects of immigration and diversity on the subjective well-being of native populations (Betz and Simpson, 2013;Longhi, 2014;Akay at al., 2014;Akay et al, 2017), the detailed review of which we provide in the next section, as well as to the broader, rapidly growing literature on subjective well-being and migration. 6 We also add to the literature studying the relative importance of individual and 6 See Simpson (2013) for an overview, Ivlevs (2015) for a review of the effects of subjective well-being on the emigration decision, Nikolova and Graham (2015) for a review of the effects of international migration on regional variation in subjective well-being, as well as the regional and local-level determinants of it.…”