Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

The financial crisis and the well-being of Americans

Contents:

Author Info

  • Angus Deaton

Abstract

I use daily data on self-reported well-being (SWB) to examine how the Great Recession affected the emotional and evaluative lives of the population. In the fall of 2008 and lasting into the spring of 2009, at the bottom of the stock market, Americans reported sharp declines in their life evaluation, sharp increases in worry and stress, and declines in positive affect. By the end of 2010, in spite of continuing high unemployment, these measures had largely recovered. The SWB measures do a better job of monitoring short-run levels of anxiety than the medium-term evolution of the economy. Even very large macroeconomic shocks will cause small and hard to detect effects on SWB. Life evaluation questions are extremely sensitive to question order effects--asking political questions first reduces reported life evaluation by an amount that dwarfs the effects of even the worst of the crisis. Copyright 2012 Oxford University Press 2011 All rights reserved, Oxford University Press.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpr051
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Oxford University Press in its journal Oxford Economic Papers.

Volume (Year): 64 (2012)
Issue (Month): 1 (January)
Pages: 1-26

as in new window
Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:64:y:2012:i:1:p:1-26

Contact details of provider:
Postal: Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK
Fax: 01865 267 985
Email:
Web page: http://oep.oupjournals.org/

Order Information:
Web: http://www.oup.co.uk/journals

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Robert Metcalfe & Nattavudh Powdthavee & Paul Dolan, 2011. "Destruction and Distress: Using a Quasi‐Experiment to Show the Effects of the September 11 Attacks on Mental Well‐Being in the United Kingdom," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 121(550), pages F81-F103, February.
  2. Rajashri Chakrabarti & Donghoon Lee & Wilbert van der Klaauw & Basit Zafar, 2011. "Household debt and saving during the 2007 recession," Staff Reports 482, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  3. DiTella, Rafael & MacCulloch, Robert & Oswald, Andrew J., 2001. "Preferences over inflation and unemployment: Evidence from surveys of happiness," ZEI Working Papers B 03-2001, ZEI - Center for European Integration Studies, University of Bonn.
  4. Michael Hurd & Susann Rohwedder, 2010. "Effects of the Financial Crisis and Great Recession on American Households," Working Papers 810, RAND Corporation Publications Department.
  5. Andrew E. Clark & Andreas Knabe & Steffen Rätzel, 2008. "Boon or Bane? Others' unemployment, well-being and job insecurity," PSE Working Papers halshs-00586022, HAL.
  6. Graham, Carol & Eggers, Andrew & Sukhtankar, Sandip, 2004. "Does happiness pay?: An exploration based on panel data from Russia," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 55(3), pages 319-342, November.
  7. Andrew E. Clark & Andreas Knabe & Steffen Rätzel, 2008. "Boon or Bane? Others' unemployment, well-being and job insecurity," Working Papers halshs-00586022, HAL.
  8. repec:pse:psecon:2008-67 is not listed on IDEAS
  9. Dimitrios Christelis & Dimitris Georgarakos & Tullio Jappelli, 2011. "Wealth Shocks, Unemployment Shocks and Consumption in the Wake of the Great Recession," CSEF Working Papers 279, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy, revised 19 Oct 2011.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Marcus Klemm, 2011. "You Don‘t Know what You‘ve got till It‘s Gone! Unemployment and Intertemporal Changes in Self-Reported Life Satisfaction," Ruhr Economic Papers 0297, Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Dortmund, Universität Duisburg-Essen.
  2. Cojocaru, Alexandru & Diagne, Mame Fatou, 2013. "How reliable and consistent are subjective measures of welfare in Europe and Central Asia ? evidence from the second life in transition survey," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6359, The World Bank.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:64:y:2012:i:1:p:1-26

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Oxford University Press) or (Christopher F. Baum).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.