My paper with Joe Baker and Kim Craft is now available.*
We look at the determinants of reported happiness of people who got undergraduate degrees in economics.
The skinny? Former economics majors:
- Don’t have a very high baseline of satisfaction with their jobs,
- Getting paid more helps, but not too much,
- Having a job with responsibilities helps,
- Having a job where you’re independent helps,
- Being able to choose your location helps, and
- Using your degree in your job helps.
Each of those last 4 is equivalent to moving from about the 50th to the 90th percentile in income, so they are not small.
* There were technical problems at the journal’s end. This paper was accepted quite a while ago, but this is the first I’ve seen of it in “print”.
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