El próximo seminario de investigación del Departamento de Economía tendrá lugar el martes 11 de marzo a las 14h. La información del seminario y del ponente es la siguiente:  

Título de la presentación: Reversing the Reversal? A Systematic Reassessment and Meta-Analysis of Wellbeing Research

Autores: Anthony Lepinteur (University of Luxembourg) y Caspar Kaiser (Warwick Business School)

Lugar: Aula 2.7, a las 14h.

Resumen: The feasibility of cardinally measuring ‘wellbeing’ through surveys has become a contentious topic in recent debates. Several influential papers argue that treating survey data as purely ordinal and accounting for heterogeneity within response categories can overturn established findings in the literature. To evaluate this claim, we conduct a systematic replication of the entire body of wellbeing research published in leading economics journals since 2010. Our analysis covers more than 60 studies, comprising approximately 25,000 regression coefficients. We examine whether the signs of these coefficients remain stable under all positive monotonic transformations of the wellbeing scale and when plausible heterogeneity within response categories is introduced. Our findings suggest that the risk of sign reversal is relatively low and is consistently linked to specific aspects of research design. Additionally, we explore the sensitivity of coefficients in terms of significance and magnitude when cardinality assumptions are relaxed. Our results indicate that while coefficients are generally robust, some exhibit considerable sensitivity under these adjustments.