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Journal of Happiness Studies
Published in: Journal of Happiness Studies 2/2021

13-03-2020 | Research Paper

Are Not Any Silver Linings in the Cloud? Subjective Well-being Among Deprived Young People

Authors: Paula Carrasco, Rodrigo Ceni, Ivone Perazzo, Gonzalo Salas

Published in: Journal of Happiness Studies | Issue 2/2021

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the channels of change of subjective well-being (SWB), and how are the effects of a social intermediation program. We develop a simple theoretical model to link SWB with the individual and reference wealth, the effort and the level of aspirations. After to overcome selection issues with an instrumental variable to identify causal effects, we find a negative impact on SWB being the main channel of this change is subjective relative wealth, i.e., the relation between the individual and the reference wealth. There is no effect through other theoretical channels, but the results on SWB are heterogeneous by psychological features; they are higher among those with low aspiration levels and external locus of control. Finally, we disentangle the main program characteristics that might generate this effect giving relevant information for the policymakers.
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Footnotes
1
Some of the few examples of such endeavors in Latin America which specifically tackle extreme poverty include: Juntos-Unidos in Colombia (Abramovsky et al. 2016), Chile Solidario (Camacho et al. 2014; Carneiro et al. 2019), and others to alleviate poverty and create supportive environments pushing early childhood development such as Chile Crece Contigo among others Richter et al. (2017).
 
2
The Easterlin Paradox states that, statistically, happiness varies directly with income both between and within nations, but when we consider it dynamically, happiness does not trend upward as income does.
 
3
The Social Protection Minister uses this measure to evaluate the relative deprivation of households. This measure includes durables, housing condition and education environment among others.
 
4
These areas are established by the National Statistics Institute to organize the Household and Population Census, and are determined by the population density and not by other characteristics such as private or public services. In the maps we only analyze Montevideo, which is the capital city and represent around the 50% of our population.
 
5
This percentage is the number of individuals in the objective population in census area i divided by the sum of the number of individuals in the objective population of all census areas i in JeR zone j .
 
6
The main entranceway in our sample is JeR teams covering the surrounding area of the reference centers and contacting groups of young people, but there is a possibility that some youngsters reach out to the program voluntarily. These two ways can reflect different levels of a priori motivation to participate and to reach objectives. To overcome this concern, we consider only the first wave of participants (within four months since the launching) to restrict the sample to those who know about the program through former participants; those who remain in JeR at least 18 months, and for the control ones, those who answer that they would participate in a programs with JeR characteristics.
 
7
These households are the more deprived among the beneficiaries of all government social programs.
 
8
Through Principal Component Analysis we aggregate the information contain in several variables about satisfaction constructing a component as in Goswami (2012), which is a linear combination of all the variables and it capture the common variation underlying between the variables. We also perform a fuzzy set, and the results are robust to the aggregation methodology.
 
9
Those in the treated population are include in their JeR work team and those in the control group are assigned to a group in the same neighborhood and with essentially the same observables compared to the treated ones.
 
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Metadata
Title
Are Not Any Silver Linings in the Cloud? Subjective Well-being Among Deprived Young People
Authors
Paula Carrasco
Rodrigo Ceni
Ivone Perazzo
Gonzalo Salas
Publication date
13-03-2020
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Happiness Studies / Issue 2/2021
Print ISSN: 1389-4978
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7780
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00238-4

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