TY  - JOUR
AU  - Blanchflower,David G.
AU  - Oswald,Andrew J.
TI  - Hypertension and Happiness across Nations
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12934
PY  - 2007
Y2  - February 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12934
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12934.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David G. Blanchflower
Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Economics
6106 Rockefeller Hall
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH  03755-3514
Tel: 603/646-2536
Fax: 603/646-2122
E-Mail: David.G.Blanchflower@Dartmouth.EDU

Andrew Oswald
Department of Economics
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
England
Tel: 44-01203-5235
Fax: 44-01203-5230
E-Mail: a.j.oswald@warwick.ac.uk
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2007-10-01
AB  - A modern statistical literature argues that countries such as Denmark are particularly happy while nations like East Germany are not.  Are such claims credible?  The paper explores this by building on two ideas.  The first is that psychological well-being and high blood-pressure are thought by clinicians to be inversely correlated.  The second is that blood-pressure problems can be reported more objectively than mental well-being.  Using data on 16 countries, the paper finds that happier nations report lower levels of hypertension.  The paper's results are consistent with, and seem to offer a step towards the validation of, cross-national estimates of well-being.
ER  -