Happiness Presentation
Overview The Basic Questions: Do personal and/or national news cause short-term movements in Self-Reported Happiness? How quickly does happiness revert to its long-run average after a piece of news? How accurately can people self-report the importance of a piece of news?
Background
Data Set
Question 1: Do personal and/or national news cause short-term movements in Self-Reported Happiness? Our Approach: Measure the strength of the effect of reported news on reported happiness Problem: News is serially correlated.
Solution: Whitening Procedure: Regress news on lags of itself to remove the autoregressive effect The residuals of this regression should represent “true” news, or innovations. These innovations are a better explanatory variable for self-reported happiness.
(personal news whitening table goes here)
(personal news whitening table goes here)
(national news whitening table goes here)
Whitened News
Hedonic Adaptation Findings Key Results:
Another Issue: Do positive and negative news affect people’s happiness differently? Our Approach: Regress happiness on news AND negative news at the same time to isolate the effects of excess negativity
Negative Sensitivity (Personal)
Negative Sensitivity (National)