1. Happiness Presentation

2. 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?

3. Background

4. Data Set

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. (personal news whitening table goes here)

8. (personal news whitening table goes here)

9. (national news whitening table goes here)

11. Whitened News

12. Hedonic Adaptation Findings
Key Results:

13. 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

14. Negative Sensitivity (Personal)

15. Negative Sensitivity (National)