Department of Finance, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Babeş-Bolyai University, Teodor Mihali Street, no. 58-60, 400591, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Department of Statistics-Forecasts-Mathematics, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Babes-Bolyai University, Teodor Mihali Street, no. 58-60, 400591, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Eur J Health Econ. 2023 Jul;24(5):749-768. doi: 10.1007/s10198-022-01506-1. Epub 2022 Aug 19.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes into people's lives. Fear, job insecurity, changes in their financial stability, concerns about their future lives have changed the entire lives of people and have affected the cognitive well-being of individuals. The purpose of the present analysis is to measure how the COVID-19 pandemic, along with financial factors, has affected the perceived level of well-being of individuals. We are also interested whether there are differences between life before COVID-19, life now with COVID-19, and life after the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of future expectations. To address this objective, we performed an ANOVA approach and a GLM estimate on repeated measures for a large sample (1572 respondents) from 43 worldwide countries, during the period May 2020 and July 2021. Our results show that financial factors reflected by both the size of income and changes in personal or family income affect the levels of happiness. Robustness checks using stress as an alternative estimator for happiness have consolidated our results. Additionally, we find that well-being during COVID-19 compared to the previous period decreased, while in future, people expect to be happier, but not more than in the past when they did not know about the existence of this virus. This is one of the first studies to investigate the relationship between happiness and income before, during, and after COVID-19. These findings are important for policymakers to improve the conditions of living in the areas of health and financial stability.
新冠疫情大流行给人们的生活带来了诸多变化。恐惧、工作不稳定、经济稳定性变化、对未来生活的担忧改变了人们的全部生活，影响了个人的认知幸福感。本分析旨在衡量新冠疫情以及财务因素如何影响个人的幸福感感知水平。我们还想知道，在新冠疫情之前、现在和之后，人们对未来的期望是否存在差异。为了实现这一目标，我们对来自 43 个国家的 1572 名受访者在 2020 年 5 月至 2021 年 7 月期间进行了重复测量的方差分析（ANOVA）和广义线性模型（GLM）估计。结果表明，收入规模和个人或家庭收入变化所反映的财务因素会影响幸福感水平。使用压力作为幸福感的替代估计值进行稳健性检查，巩固了我们的结果。此外，我们发现，与前一时期相比，新冠疫情期间的幸福感下降了，而未来人们期望更幸福，但不如他们在不了解这种病毒存在时更幸福。这是首次研究新冠疫情前、中、后期幸福感与收入之间关系的研究之一。这些发现对政策制定者改善健康和金融稳定领域的生活条件很重要。
