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Measuring Progress: STATEC Well-being Seminar Series
1 March 2022
17:00 CET (11:00 AM Eastern) – 18:00 CET (12:00 PM Eastern)
Dr. Maria Rosalia Vicente, University of Oviedo
Dr. Pablo de Pedraza, European Commission, Joint Research Centre
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Are Spaniards Happier When the Bars Are Open? Using Life Satisfaction to Evaluate COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs)
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged governments worldwide with the design of appropriate policies that maximize health outcomes while minimizing economic and mental health consequences. This paper explores sources of individuals’ life satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, paying special attention to the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). We studied the specific case of Spanish regions and focused on bar and restaurant closures using data from a continuous voluntary web survey that we merged with information about region-specific policies that identified when and where bars and restaurants were closed. We estimated an endogenous binary-treatment-regression model and found that closing bars and restaurants had a significant negative impact on happiness. The results were statistically significant after controlling for the pandemic context, health, income, work, and other personal characteristics and circumstances. We interpreted the results in terms of the positive effect of socialization, individuals’ feelings of freedom, and the comparative nature of life satisfaction.
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Dr. Maria Rosalia Vicente is an associate professor at the Department of Applied Economics in the University of Oviedo (Spain). Her research interests focus on information and communication technologies (ICT), their socio-economic effects, and the use of big data for economic forecasting. Her research appears in journals such as: Applied Economic Letters, Economic Letters, Computers in Human Behaviour, Government Information Quarterly, Information & Management, The Information Society, Research Evaluation, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and Telecommunications Policy.
Dr. Pablo de Pedraza is a researcher and project manager at the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Monitoring, Indicators and Impact Evaluation Unit. He works on indexes related to small business and conducts research on topics including the data economy, life satisfaction, job insecurity, the labor market, and web-based data collection methods. Since 2005, he has been a member of the Wage Indicator foundation, which conducts multinational and multilingual labour oriented web surveys. He also coordinated Webdatanet, a network that brought together experts aiming to address methodological issues of web-based data collection.
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