Unhappy at home: should you blame your partner's job? An Empirical Study of happiness transmission

TL;DRAbstract

Do happy or unhappy individuals contaminate the other members of their household? The idea of within-household contagion effects has very seldom been explored in the literature, probably because the available household data are in general not informative enough with respect to the interdependence between the members of households. This paper incorporates some theoretical ideas from epidemiological models to the study of within-household spill-over effects. Two main goals are actually targeted. First, I examine the extent to which the overall household level of job satisfaction influences the level of life satisfaction of each of the parents; overall household job satisfaction being measured as the sum of individual levels, other than that of the individual of interest. Second, I explore how the probability of divorce is sensitive to the partners' levels of life satisfaction. I use the French version of the European Community Households Panel (ECHP) for the period 1994-2001. I find sign

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