The Anatomy of Subjective Well-Being

Subjective Well-Being has increasingly been studied by several economists. This paper fits in that literature but takes into account that there are different aspects of life such as health, financial situation, and job. We call them domains. In this paper, we consider Subjective Well-Being as a composite of various domain satisfactions (DS). We postulate a two -layer model where individual Subjective Well-Being is explained by individual subjective domain satisfactions with respect to job, finance, health, leisure, housing, and environment. We distinguish between long -term and short - term effects. Next, we explain domain satisfactions and Subjective Well-Being by objectively measurable variables such as income. We estimate a model for the GS and DS equations with individual random effects and fix time effects.Subjective Well-Being, satisfaction measurement, qualitative regressors, health satisfaction, job satisfaction

The Anatomy of Subjective Well-being

Subjective Well-Being has increasingly been studied by several economists. This paper fits in that literature but takes into account that there are different aspects of life such as health, financial situation, and job. We call them domains. In this paper, we consider Subjective Well-Being as a composite of various domain satisfactions (DS). We postulate a two -layer model where individual Subjective Well-Being is explained by individual subjective domain satisfactions with respect to job, finance, health, leisure, housing, and environment. We distinguish between long -term and short - term effects. Next, we explain domain satisfactions and Subjective Well-Being by objectively measurable variables such as income. We estimate a model for the GS and DS equations with individual random effects and fix time effects

The Emerging Aversion to Inequality: Evidence from Poland 1992-2005

This paper provides an illustration of the changing tolerance for inequality in a context of radical political and economic transformation and rapid economic growth. We focus on the Polish experience of transition and explore self-declared attitudes of the citizens. Using monthly representative surveys of the population, realized by the Polish poll institute (CBOS) from 1992 to 2005, we identify a structural break in the relation between income inequality and subjective evaluation of well-being. The downturn in the tolerance for inequality (1997) coincides with the increasing distrust of political elites.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64387/1/wp919.pd

Rising happiness in nations,1946-2004. A reply to Easterlin

ABSTRACT The ‘Easterlin paradox’ holds that economic growth does not add to the quality-of-life and that this appears in the fact that average happiness in nations has not risen in the last few decades. The latest trend data show otherwise. Average happiness has increased slightly in rich nations and considerably in the few poor nations for which data are available. Since longevity has also increased, the average number of happy life years has increased at an unprecedented rate since the 1950s

Efficient inverted tandem polymer solar cells with a solution-processed recombination layer

Solution-processed tandem polymer solar cells with an inverted polarity configuration provide a power conversion efficiency of 5.8%. The tandem cells use an almost loss-free recombination layer and two photoactive layers, with wide and small bandgaps, to increase the power conversion efficiency beyond that of the corresponding single-layer cells

Marketing in het Amphia Ziekenhuis

In this time period Dutch general hospitals are operating in a dynamic environment. Introduction of regulating market forces and changes in consumer behaviour are important aspects of this environment. Patients take up a more critical position and want more effective and efficient response to their needs. The implementation of strategic and internal marketing offers the opportunity to obtain and hold a proper position in this changing environment for a hospital. The central question for this research therefore is: “In what way can internal marketing, as an implementation of strategic marketing, be formed and shaped in a Dutch general hospital, such as Amphia Hospital?” In a holistic approach of marketing it is important to interpret and connect the strategic marketing to the internal business management with the help of internal marketing. Firstly is concluded that the patient is the primary customer of a hospital. Furthermore there is established that medical specialists and the management of hospitals must serve the needs of patients as partners. To do so in a proper way hospitals must organize themselves into small enterprises that must have a great amount of self-employment to act en react quickly at environmental changes. Leaders of the hospital must be exemplary in their behaviour and they must spread out succesful initiatives through the organization. So members of the organization will be able to learn. Instruments for internal marketing, such as customer knowledge, employee recruitment, selection and training must be organized in a coherent programme. In this way customer values and targets of the organization can be translated to behaviour of employees. When Amphia Hospital spells out its strategic marketing plans and applicates internal marketing this will lead to an external customer focus and to a market oriented culture throughout the entire organization. And Amphia Hospital will be able to achieve and hold a proper position in a dynamic environment.Op dit moment opereren algemene Nederlandse ziekenhuizen in een dynamische omgeving. Invoering van gereguleerde marktwerking en een verandering in klantgedrag is aan de orde. Patiënten stellen zich steeds kritischer op en willen adequater in hun behoeften worden voorzien. Het toepassen van strategische en interne marketing biedt een ziekenhuis de mogelijkheid in deze veranderende omgeving een positie te verwerven en te behouden. De centrale vraagstelling van dit onderzoek is daarom: “Hoe kan interne marketing als doorvertaling van strategische marketing in een algemeen Nederlands ziekenhuis als het Amphia Ziekenhuis vorm en inhoud krijgen?” In een holistische benadering van marketing is het van belang de strategische marketing te vertalen naar de interne bedrijfsvoering met behulp van interne marketing. Allereerst is vastgesteld dat de patiënt de primaire klant is voor een ziekenhuis en dat medisch specialisten samen met de ziekenhuisorganisatie deze klanten voorzien in hun behoeften. Om dat goed te kunnen doen moeten ziekenhuizen kleine zelfstandige eenheden vormen die een grote mate van zelfstandigheid hebben om snel te kunnen handelen en te reageren op een dynamische omgeving. Binnen algemene Nederlandse ziekenhuizen moeten leiders voorbeeldgedrag vertonen en succesvolle initiatieven benutten als leerervaringen door ze te verspreiden door de organisatie. Instrumenten voor interne marketing, zoals klantkennis, werving en selectie, training van medewerkers moeten in een samenhangend programma verbonden worden. Op deze manier kan een doorvertaling van klantwaarden en organisatiedoelstellingen naar concreet gedrag gerealiseerd worden. Wanneer het Amphia Ziekenhuis haar strategische marketing uitzet en interne marketing toepast zal door heel de organisatie heen de aandacht gericht zijn op de externe klant en een marktgeoriënteerde cultuur. Het ziekenhuis zal in staat blijken te zijn te blijven opereren in een dynamische omgeving

Who settles for less? Subjective dispositions, objective circumstances, and housing satisfaction

In recent years there has been growing interest in individuals’ self-perceptions of their wellbeing on the grounds that these complement well-established objective indicators of welfare. However, individuals’ assessments depend on both objective circumstances and subjective, idiosyncratic dispositions, such as aspirations and expectations. We add to the literature by formulating a modelling strategy that uncovers how these subjective dispositions differ across socio-demographic groups. This is then tested using housing satisfaction data from a large-scale household panel survey from Australia. We find that there are significant differences in the way in which individuals with different characteristics rate the same objective reality. For instance, male, older, migrant, and Indigenous individuals rate equal housing conditions more favourably than female, younger, Australian-born, and non-Indigenous individuals. These findings have important implications for how self-reported housing satisfaction, and wellbeing data in general, are to be used to inform evidence-based policy

Life satisfaction and confidence in national institutions: evidence from South America

A number of South American countries experienced turbulent democratic, political and economic upheaval over the last 40 years in the form of coup d’états in the 1970s, tumultuous elections, and repeated severe economic crises, some of which happened fairly recently. Starting in 2010, a number of court proceedings across the region have made past military coup d’états the focus of national conversations. South American citizens may, therefore, have lost confidence in national institutions that have repeatedly disappointed their trust and expectations; a situation with potentially detrimental effects on their well-being. Using eight waves of the Gallup World Poll collected between 2009 and 2016 across ten South American countries, we investigate to what extent people’s confidence in financial institutions, the honesty of elections, the military, the judicial system, the national government and the police is associated with people’s current and expectation of future life satisfaction. We find that people who report confidence in these six institutions rate their current and expected life satisfaction, on average, to be higher than those who lack these types of institutional confidence, even after controlling for demographic factors and macroeconomic indicators. In addition, we investigate changes over time for all six measures of confidence in institutions as well as for current and expectation of future life satisfaction. Our results suggest that governments’ investments in well-functioning institutions may contribute positively to subjective well-being in a society. However, our analysis is correlational and we thus cannot rule out reverse causality

CoPub update: CoPub 5.0 a text mining system to answer biological questions

In this article, we present CoPub 5.0, a publicly available text mining system, which uses Medline abstracts to calculate robust statistics for keyword co-occurrences. CoPub was initially developed for the analysis of microarray data, but we broadened the scope by implementing new technology and new thesauri. In CoPub 5.0, we integrated existing CoPub technology with new features, and provided a new advanced interface, which can be used to answer a variety of biological questions. CoPub 5.0 allows searching for keywords of interest and its relations to curated thesauri and provides highlighting and sorting mechanisms, using its statistics, to retrieve the most important abstracts in which the terms co-occur. It also provides a way to search for indirect relations between genes, drugs, pathways and diseases, following an ABC principle, in which A and C have no direct connection but are connected via shared B intermediates. With CoPub 5.0, it is possible to create, annotate and analyze networks using the layout and highlight options of Cytoscape web, allowing for literature based systems biology. Finally, operations of the CoPub 5.0 Web service enable to implement the CoPub technology in bioinformatics workflows. CoPub 5.0 can be accessed through the CoPub portal http://www.copub.org

LB3D: A Parallel Implementation of the Lattice-Boltzmann Method for Simulation of Interacting Amphiphilic Fluids

We introduce the lattice-Boltzmann code LB3D, version 7.1. Building on a parallel program and supporting tools which have enabled research utilising high performance computing resources for nearly two decades, LB3D version 7 provides a subset of the research code functionality as an open source project. Here, we describe the theoretical basis of the algorithm as well as computational aspects of the implementation. The software package is validated against simulations of meso-phases resulting from self-assembly in ternary fluid mixtures comprising immiscible and amphiphilic components such as water–oil–surfactant systems. The impact of the surfactant species on the dynamics of spinodal decomposition are tested and quantitative measurement of the permeability of a body centred cubic (BCC) model porous medium for a simple binary mixture is described. Single-core performance and scaling behaviour of the code are reported for simulations on current supercomputer architectures