For every paper published, there's a story behind it...

As you will be able to see, I owe a lot of my research outputs to Andrew Oswald

2010

"How Much Does Money Really Matter? Estimating the Causal Effects of Income on Happiness", Empirical Economics, forthcoming

This paper is a spin-off from my paper with Andrew on death and compensatory damages. I had wanted to write an applied paper that empirically teases out the true effect of income on happiness, and I think I kind of pull it off with this one. Hopefully, it will turn out to be useful for happiness economists and policy makers out there.  

 "Daughters and Leftwing Voting" with Andrew Oswald, The Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming

Andrew came to visit me at IoE back in 2006. He had just come back from a visiting post at Harvard and, boy, did he have a good idea for a paper. He told me that he was very impressed with Ebonya Washington's presentation on the effect of daughters on senator's tendency to be pro-liberal and was wondering whether we could do something similar but on a much bigger scale. We agreed on having a look at the BHPS and see whether daughters have any significant correlations with people's tendency to vote for Labour or Lib Dem party. And imagine our surprise that they do!

I remember that I did this paper's empirical bits in one weekend (looking for plausible empirical strategies and doing the estimates, etc.) and Andrew wrote it in less than two weeks. We then had a press release for it, which got on the Guardian's front page. I also had to do a couple of radio interviews for it, which was quite fun. Andrew also went on a BBC radio show where our findings got called ridiculous by one of the journalists. He (Andrew, not the journalist) took it in his stride, really. He basically told her (though not in so many words) that she's going to have a hard time arguing with hard numbers. Since then, our paper has been replicated using the German data, the US, and the Aussie data. Finally got the paper accepted for publication at RESTAT after two years of having completed the paper. 

2009

"What Happens to People Before and After Disability? Focusing Effects, Lead Effects, and Adaptation in Different Areas of Life", Social Science & Medicine, 69, 1834-1844.

The idea for this paper came from a presentation I did on "Does happiness adapt?" at an invited seminar at Sheffield University. Thanks to Tess (Peasgood) who invited me and Aki Tsuchiya who gave really good comments on the paper, I came up with an idea to test whether different domain satisfactions vary significantly before and after disability. And it's a good thing that they do!

"I Can't Smile Without You: Spousal Correlation in Life Satisfaction", Journal of Economic Psychology, 30(4), 675-689.

If somebody had asked me, "Which paper are you most proud of?", I'd probably coil slighly and say this one. I mean, I am proud of all my papers, especially the ones I've done myself. But this one has to come up trump.

The idea came to me in 2004, when I was in my 2nd year PhD. I had wanted to test whether happiness is transferrable between partners in a romantic relationship. But there is this issue about endogeneity (how can we find an instrumental variable that affects one partner's happiness but not the other's?). I remember telling Andrew about this idea and he said he loved it. But it's going to be extremely difficult trying to achieve identification. I don't remember exactly what I did with the first version now, but I think I used each partner's subjective health as IV. First submitted it to the Review of Economics Studies, and got a rejection within 8 months. Then AER. Then JPE, QJE, Journal of Human Resources (twice at different times), Journal of Marriage and Family (revised and resubmitted three times), Journal of Family Psychology, Journal of Royal Statistical Society Series A (revise and resubmitted three times), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Psychological Science.  Needless to say, the submission was done in sequence. Also, needless to say, all rejected the original version of the paper. Then I got a breakthrough at the Journal of Economic Psychology when I got some great referee comments that I can use GMM-system to solve the identification problems. I re-did the paper and, as I had always been confident that it would, it worked out perfectly! I remember whooping for joy when I got accepted.

I know that J of Econ Psy is not the best journals in the world and I should have been more proud with the papers I've done with Andrew which got accepted in higher-ranked journals. But to finally have it accepted after 15 rejections in 5 years, I just couldn't be more proud of it if I try...

"The Socio-economic Gap in University Drop Out", with Anna Vignoles, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, Vol. 9: Iss. 1 (Topics), Article 19.

This paper was written when I was employed as a research officer at the Institute of Education in London. My former line-manager (now colleague) Anna Vignoles was probably one of the nicest bosses you could come across for your first post in academia. We did this work together over the course of my three years there - my first work on the economics of education.

Book review: "Bernard Van Praag and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell's Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach. Revised Version. Oxford University Press.", Journal of Economic Literature, 47(1), 204-207

The book review request from JOEL came to me in November 2008 in a completely unexpected way. Since I've never done a book review before, this was a very pleasant surprise, and what a challenge! The book itself was a little hard to read (it fills with a lot of stats and regression equations) but I really enjoyed the task (especially the one about having to come up with an eye-catching opening line!).

"How Important is Rank to Individual Perception of Economic Standing? A Within-Community Analysis", Journal of Economic Inequality, 7(3), 225-248.

This is a spin-off from two papers. One comes from my Indonesian paper (published in AEJ), and the other is from Andrew Oswald et al's paper on well-being rank in the workplace. I remember having this idea of testing Andrew's theory using the Indo data. But instead of looking at the workplace, I decided to look at the community-level comparison of ranks instead. I remember spending hours after hours in my room at 179 Queen Alexandra Palace in London cleaning this hard to clean Indonesian panel data. I was so pleased to get it done within a month, and decided to send it off to one of the top rank journals straightaway. However, it was rejected the next morning. I then re-submitted it again that very same afternoon (to a different high-ranking journal). Then, to my horror, got rejected the next morning. That's the first time (and hopefully the only time) I've ever been rejected twice for the same paper in one day. But knowing the world of publication, I revised it one more time and kept on trying. Finally got it accepted at the JoEI after one revise and resubmit.

"Ill-Health as a Household Norm: Evidence from Other People's Health Problems", Social Science & Medicine, 68, 251-259

This paper was quite a joy to write. It, again, is a spin-off from my Crime and Unemployment papers (most credits go to Andrew Clark's original idea here). The idea that I had was quite simple: Do people with chronic diseases report higher levels of subjective health status (i.e. do they they they are healthier) when there are more ill people around in the same household. As it turns out, they do - but the effect is not as large as I thought it would be.

2008

"Death, Happiness, and the Calculation of Compensatory Damages", with Andrew Oswald, Journal of Legal Studies, 37(S2), June, S217-S252

Andrew phoned me up one day telling me that he was invited to go to a law & economics conference at the University of Chicago and had to come up with a good paper that is publishable in the Journal of Legal Studies, which basically is a law journal. He proposed the idea about death to me, and asked whether there might be a way to test the impact of death on well-being more systematically. I'm not sure whether I should say 'luckily' or not, but the BHPS has a couple of questions about the important events that took place in the last year and we had a significant number of deaths in that data set. The whole analysis on my part took, I think it was, 2 weekends and a paper was completed within a few weeks. It was quite a grim paper (in terms of the research topic) but, boy, do we love it!

"Does Happiness Adapt? A Longitudinal Study of Disability with Implications for Economists and Judges", with Andrew Oswald, Journal of Public Economics, 92, 1061-1077

This is the first paper I've ever written with Andrew (I've never written a paper with him while I was still his student back at Warwick). Andrew came to London - I think it was during the Easter term in 2005 - and we went and have sushi near Tottenham Court Road. Again, adaptation was more of Andrew's idea than mine, but I came up with the method of testing it (well, I based the methodology on one of Andrew Clark's paper on the scarring of unemployment). We finished this paper in less than a month. It was rejected a couple of times from top economic journals, but eventually found its home at the Journal of Public Economics.

"Putting a Price Tag on Friends, Relatives, and Neighbours: Using Surveys of Life-Satisfaction to Value Social Relationships", Journal of Socio-Economics, 37(4), 1459-1480 

The idea for this paper came to me while I was in a car with Antony (Harfield), coming back from a trip in London. I was sitting on the front seat, and suddenly I had the urge of wanting to do some thing on loneliness and happiness. The idea of calculating for 'how much does seeing a friend every day worth?' comes a few months later after completing my PhD.

This paper also allowed me to give my very first, as well as my very own, press release at the IoE. I remember that I had to give around 20 radio interviews in the course of two weeks. I also had to wake up early one day to give a radio interview for an Australia radio programme, whilst still in my PJs and all...

"Mental Health of Parents and Life Satisfaction of Children: A Within-Family Analysis of Intergenerational Transmission of Well-Being", with Anna Vignoles, Social Indicators Research, 88(3), 397-422

Anna Vignoles, my very first boss, was very generous to me whilst I was working for her at the IoE. She told me that it would be ok to spend - maybe half the time of my research hours - to do whatever I like in terms of research. So I brought her in to work on a little project of mine, which focuses on whether happiness is transferrable between parents and children. I'm also very proud of this paper as it was accepted without revision at Social Indicators Research after spending only about two or three weeks there...     

2007

"Feeling Richer or Poorer than Others: A Cross-sectional and Panel Analysis of Subjective Economic Status in Indonesia", Asian Economic Journal, 21(2), 169-194

I was very nearly going to give up with this paper. I think I spent ages revising it for my PhD that I became sick of seeing it. The file was in my computer for a long while until one day when I was visiting my family in Thailand, I thought I'll give it another go and try for an academic journal in Asia. I was very fortunate to get a good editor who really cares about this paper at the Asian Economic Journal, and it was accepted after one revision.

"Obesity, Unhappiness, and The Challenge of Affluence: Theory and Evidence", with Andrew Oswald, Economic Journal, 117 (June), F441-454

Although it was the second paper I wrote with Andrew, it was published before our disability paper. Andrew called me one day in 2006 asking whether we could do something on obesity and well-being. He said that he was asked to do a book review for Avner Offer's The Challenge of Affluence for Economic Journal, and thought that we might be able to add some analysis of our own as a complement. I, of course, jumped at the chance and did a quick study of the BHPS for him. To date, it is one of the most cited papers that I have with him. 

"Are There Geographical Variations in the Psychological Costs of Unemployment in South Africa?", Social Indicators Research, 80(3), 629-652

The unemployment paper was the 2nd chapter of my PhD thesis (and my 2nd paper to be published in a journal). I distinctly remember that I got this idea of doing a replication of Andrew Clark's work using the South African data set while I was watching TV in Thailand. Funnily enough, this paper brought me a little bit of a bother as it was accepted for a publication at one of the South African journals while I was in my 2nd year PhD. However, Andrew believed that I could get it published somewhere else better. With that, I decided to write to apologise to the journal's editor that I won't be publishing my paper there. He didn't like that decision one bit and questioned my ethics in his reply, which he cc: to me and to Mike Devereux, who was the head of the department of economics at Warwick at that time. I was both distraught and scared - I mean, I didn't know whether I am going to be put on the Black List in terms of getting future papers published - but Andrew told me that if the journal can reject our papers, we have the right to reject our papers from publishing there. I knew it was one of those risky decisions, but I took Andrew's advice, which turned out to be a good one. I got rejected one more time after that from another journal, but then it got accepted in its first submission to Social Indicators Research. 

"Happiness and the Standard of Living: The Case of South Africa" In (eds) Bruni, L. and Porta, P.L. (eds) Handbook on the Economics of Happiness (pp. 447-486). Edward Elgar: UK 

Well, this was my first chapter - the first piece of proper research work I've ever written. I presented the results at the Happiness Conference in Milan, 2003, and for some reason, it got accepted as one of the contributing chapters in the Handbook of the Economics of Happiness book.

2005

"Unhappiness and Crime: Evidence from South Africa", Economica, 72, 531-547

My first publication! I remember getting a letter from Economica - a proper letter, and not an email - sometimes in 2003. At the top of that letter, it said 'Regretfully we have decided to reject your paper'. I didn't need to read on - I knew I got rejected. Again. But when I took the letter to my office and told Rea (Reamonn Lydon), my then office mate, he told me that it's actually a revise and resubmit decision, and not a rejection. That was when I thought - Man, there's a chance for this paper after all!

The revision took a week, and the decision to accept if for publication came around 2 months after my resubmission. I remember receiving the email, ran to Jun's house, and celebrated for 2 days. Nothing beats your first ever publication, I think!