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Cross-Country Determinants of Life Satisfaction: Exploring Different Determinants Across Groups in Society

TLDR
In this paper, the authors explore a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries and show that only a small number of factors, such as openness, business climate, postcommunism, the number of chambers in parliament, Christian majority, and infant mortality robustly influence life satisfaction across countries.
Abstract
This paper explores a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting a database of 90,000 observations in 70 countries. We distinguish four groups of aggregate variables as potential determinants of satisfaction: political, economic, institutional, and human development and culture. We use ordered probit to investigate the importance of these variables on individual life satisfaction and test the robustness of our results with Extreme Bounds Analysis. The results show that only a small number of factors, such as openness, business climate, postcommunism, the number of chambers in parliament, Christian majority, and infant mortality robustly influence life satisfaction across countries while the importance of many variables suggested in the previous literature is not confirmed. This remains largely true when the analysis splits national populations according to gender, income and political orientation also.

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References
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An Economic Theory of Democracy

Anthony Downs
TL;DR: Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout as discussed by the authors, particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote.
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Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach

TL;DR: In fact, some common properties are shared by practically all legislation, and these properties form the subject matter of this essay as discussed by the authors, which is the basis for this essay. But, in spite of such diversity, some commonsense properties are not shared.
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A sensitivity analysis of cross-country growth regressions

TL;DR: In this article, the authors study whether the conclusions from existing studies are robust or fragile when small changes in the list of independent variables occur, and they find that although "policy"appears to be importantly related to growth, there is no strong independent relationship between growth and almost every existing policy indicator.
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A sensitivity analysis of cross-country growth regressions

TL;DR: The authors examined whether the conclusions from existing studies are robust or fragile to small changes in the conditioning information set and found a positive, robust correlation between growth and the share of investment in GDP and between investment share and the ratio of international trade to GDP.
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