Working Paper: NBER ID: w16025
Authors: John F. Helliwell; Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh
Abstract: This paper uses data from global and Canadian surveys data to estimate the powerful linkages between social connections, their related social identities, and subjective well-being. Our explanatory variables include several measures of the extent and frequency of use of social networks, combined with a number of measures of general and domain-specific trust, which are often used to gauge effective social capital. Using these measures we find that trust and social network size and use are all strong predictors of subjective well-being. We demonstrate the size and impact of these effects by calculating compensating differentials, measured as the changes in household income that would produce equivalent levels of life satisfaction.\n\nWe introduce three key measures of social identity - the respondents' sense of belonging to their communities, province and country - and find that they add significantly to the explanation of life satisfaction among Canadian respondents, and provide important mediating channels whereby social capital is linked to subjective well-being.
Keywords: social capital; subjective wellbeing; trust; social identity
JEL Codes: A13; D03; D61; D62; I31; N30
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| trust and social network size (Z13) | subjective wellbeing (I31) |
| social identity (Z13) | subjective wellbeing (I31) |
| social capital (Z13) | subjective wellbeing (I31) |
| living in a country with strong social capital (Z13) | individual wellbeing (I31) |