Rosetta Lombardo (p), Fernanda Ricotta

Richard Rijnks

The impact trust has on economic performance has been widely explored. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the conditions under which trust can develop. The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect on generalized trust of the quality of government at the regional level in a multi-country context across regions in Europe. To this end, as a proxy of the quality of institutions, we use the European Quality of Government Index (EQI), calculated at regional level over 27 EU countries. The analysis, conducted on data extracted from the ESS 2012, refers to 142 regions of 15 EU members. The individual represents the unit of analysis. Since each individual lives in a region and each region is located in a country, the data have a clustered structure. Individuals living within a region are more similar to each other than a randomly selected group of individuals would be, since they share the same external environment. The error terms among the individuals within a region can be therefore correlated and the assumption of independence of OLS estimation may be violated. The adopted multilevel approach, by relaxing this assumption, provides more reliable estimates than those ignoring the hierarchical nature of the data. Moreover, it allows estimating the effects of variables at both individual and group levels, as well as possible cross-level interaction effects simultaneously. Estimates evidence the importance of individual factors such as life satisfaction, health, gender, age, education, income, crime victimization. The country in which one resides has a non-negligible effect on individual trust. To live in regions with high quality of the local government influences positively trust. This positive association survives the inclusions of contextual variables at the regional level. We also look at the effect of EQI sub-categories and find that quality of services and corruption are correlated positively to individual trust; the evidence is inconclusive for impartiality. A low level of corruption and a good quality of local services are correlated with a higher propensity to trust. We are also aware that the potential endogeneity should be taken into consideration. We will adopt the instrumental variable approach to deal with this problem.

Richard Henry Rijnks (p), Stephen Sheppard

Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn

Housing researchers confront many difficulties in identifying the contribution of structure and neighbourhood attributes to the market value of residential property. Perhaps foremost amongst these challenges is the lack of data on subjective characteristics of the neighbourhood (noise levels, friendliness of neighbours, proximity to friends and acquaintances) or difficult-to-observe subjective attributes of the structure itself (such as "curb appeal" or the layout of rooms, presence of unpleasant or simply unusual odours). While researchers appreciate that these factors can affect how much a prospective buyer is willing to pay and how much a seller must receive in order to make moving worthwhile, the lack of data is generally simply accepted, perhaps accompanied by an unspoken hope that the excluded variables are orthogonal to the measured attributes that are included so that the estimates obtained can be regarded as unbiased.

The goal of this paper is to undertake such analysis and to explore the potential for improved analysis of the value of residential property. We make use of unique data collected as part of a multi-year analysis of health outcomes, matched with data on market transactions of residential property in three provinces of the Netherlands. We focus on the ability of measures of SWB and emotional affect to provide information about the unobserved structure and neighbourhood attributes. Using a subset of our sample, we examine whether this impact appears to differ between genders. By examining disaggregated measures of SWB at individual level and a number of spatial scales, we obtain insights into whether these measurements are capturing subjective characteristics of the structure, the neighbourhood, or if subjective wellbeing is orthogonal to the transaction price.

Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn (p)

Rosetta Lombardo

This presentation covers two related projects:

Growing Up in a City Will Make You Unhappy For The Rest of Your Life.

No Urban Malaise for Millennials.


Using the U.S. General Social Survey (1972-2016) we explore the latest happiness
trends. Our results confirm earlier findings of urban malaise: Americans in
general are happiest in smaller cities and rural areas. However, the advantage
of rural living is declining--rural Americans are becoming less happy relative
to urbanites. Most interesting, our results show that the latest generation,
Millennials (1982-2004), as opposed to earlier generations are the happiest in large cities (an estimated magnitude larger than earning an additional $100k in family income annually).

Before the conference, we plan to have investigated the Millenials effect across the countries using WVS data.

We also explore the effect of growing up in a city on current happiness, and we
find that people who grew up in cities are less happy later in their lives above and beyond unhappiness associated with currently living in a city. Strikingly, the negative effect of urbanicity in one's youth is about as strong statistically and practically (effect size) as effect of urbanicity of current place. We add one more new finding: there may be a happiness benefit to growing up at a farm. The present study is inspired by Lederbogen et al. (2011) who showed that growing up in a city has a negative lasting effect later in person's life.