Three times more than money: generativity, relational goods and life satisfaction

Abstract

Generativity and the quality of relational goods are two key drivers of subjective well-being traditionally neglected in the economic literature. By using two different data sources – the European Social Survey (ESS) and the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) - we investigate their impact on life satisfaction of two large samples of Italian individuals. Our findings show that the effect is positive and significant and, in both estimates from the two different data sources, a change from the lowest to the highest level of relational life has an impact three times larger than the change from the lowest to the highest income decile.