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This paper aims to determine to what extent the housing affordability crisis is a “global” crisis and to what extent there is a variation across countries and over time, in who is concerned about housing affordability.

The author analyses data from about 500,000 respondents from over 140 countries and uses both descriptive statistics as well as regression analysis (using a random effects within between model [Bell et al., 2019]).

The findings show that concerns about housing affordability are widespread both within and across countries but the extent of these concerns depends greatly on the country, the subgroup and the indicator analysed. Moreover, in many countries, more people worry about other aspects of life than about housing affordability.

The global diversity in the housing affordability crisis suggests that one should be cautious when extrapolating research findings for a given country to other countries or when proposing housing policy transfer across countries.

The specific nature of the housing affordability crisis varies substantially across countries. Policymakers thus should be aware that there is no guarantee that a housing affordability policy that was effective in one country will also be effective in another country.

This paper is original in its use of the Gallup World poll, a unique survey, which is done world-wide and hence is ideally suited for the purpose of this paper, providing a much more detailed picture of the global housing crisis than so far available in the literature.

This paper aims to establish the state of employee engagement levels in Europe and offer insights into the reasons behind the current state of affairs. It proposes that management matters most out of all the factors influencing employee engagement, and that European organisations should therefore invest in equipping their leadership teams to provide employees with a positive experience of the workplace.

This paper uses data from the Gallup World Poll, which Gallup has used to conduct surveys of the world’s adult population, using randomly selected samples, since 2005. Covering more than 160 countries since its inception, the survey was conducted via computer-assisted telephone interviews in 2020 to account for COVID-compliant safety measures.

This paper provides insights into the engagement levels of European employees, which remained dismally low in 2020 as it has for the last decade. By far, the biggest influence on the state of employee engagement is leadership, which will require improvement if European organisations are to improve their employee engagement levels.

This paper fulfils the need for organisations to gain a better understanding of how to improve their employee engagement levels in the wake of a significant global crisis. Inspiring workplace cultures that maximise the well-being of every employee can help to reverse the decline of economic dynamism across the globe.

The COVID-19 pandemic created not only a public health crisis but also the largest disruption to the global economies. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the adverse impacts of the pandemic on self-employment including job loss, income reduction and cut back in work hours and how these impacts were related to the well-being the self-employed. The authors also examine how self-employers responded to adversity in different cultural settings.

The main sample was obtained the Gallup World Poll that covers more than 39,000 individuals across 55 countries over the period from October 2020 to June 2021. The ordinary least square was the main choice of methodology. The paper employs the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique to quantify the gap in financial loss between self-employed and employed individuals. Finally, the moderated mediation analysis allows the authors to examine how financial loss mediates the reduction in well-being of self-employers.

The paper finds that self-employers were 29% more likely to lose their businesses than paid individuals to lose their jobs and perhaps as a result, they were 50% more likely to experience lower work hours and less income. The findings suggest that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic varied across countries. The financial gap between self-employment and full-time employment was narrower in countries with individualism, low uncertainty avoidance and propensity for long-term future. Finally, the paper shows that although financial loss associated with the coronavirus situation mediated the relationship between self-employment and reduced wellbeing, the positive relationship between self-employment and life satisfaction (wellbeing) held amid the pandemic. Despite all the pecuniary setbacks relative to full-time employment, self-employers report higher subjective wellbeing than regular wage earners during difficult times.

The earnings gap between self-employers and employees persists (and increase) during adverse conditions may cast into doubt the efficiency of the economic system that ensures no one is left behind. In addition, contextual factors such as cultural values should also be taken into consideration in reducing the earning gap between self-employment and regular employment. It is also implied that the self-employed choose to engage in self-employment due to psychological and emotion benefits rather than material achievements.

This study has quantified the income gap between self-employment and employed individuals in the context of adverse economic conditions. This study also highlights the fact that despite all the financial setbacks, self-employers are happier than employed individuals and they engage in self-employment as an important way to pursue happiness. This highlights well-being as the critical non-pecuniary benefits of the career choice of and transition into self-employment that have been confirmed in extant entrepreneurship literature.

In this study, the authors aim to understand the antecedents of technology adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa by investigating the relationship between people's economic status, their positive attitudes, and the adoption of communications technology.

The authors used data obtained from the Gallup World Poll that was conducted in 2008. The Gallup World Poll is a survey of residents in more than 150 countries. Based on a sample of 8,787 in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria, the authors used SEM to test the hypotheses.

Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that economic status significantly predicts both positive attitudes and technology adoption. Further, the authors found that infrastructure development moderates the relationship between economic status and technology adoption.

The study attempts to plug the gaps in established theories of technology adoption which typically do not take into consideration factors that are peculiar to LDC contexts.

The relationship between demographic factors and worker well-being has garnered increased attention, but empirical studies have shown to inconsistent results. This chapter addresses this issue by examining how age, gender, and race/ethnicity relate to worker well-being using large, representative samples. Data from the Gallup Healthways Index and Gallup World Poll provided information on both job and life satisfaction outcomes for full-time workers in the United States and 156 countries, respectively. In general, results indicated that increasing age was associated with more workers reporting job satisfaction and fewer people reporting stress and negative affect. Women were comparable to men in reported job satisfaction and well-being, but more women reported experiencing negative affect and stress. Less consistent well-being differences in ethnic/racial groups were found. Finally, we found strong evidence for direct and indirect national demographic effects on worker well-being showing need for considering workforce demography in future theory building. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This paper examines the determinants of happiness index ratings in European countries over 8 time points using unique data from the Eurostat, World Bank and World Happiness Reports.

To examine the determinants of happiness index ratings for EU-27 countries over the period 2012–2019, panel ordinary least square and quantile regression model are used to data obtained from all sample.

Evidence from European data on happiness index generate some important key outcomes; economic outcomes levels with both current taxes and inflation rate have a positively relationship on happiness index ratings (HIR), while total employment rate has a significant negativity on HIR. Additionally, in a quantile panel regression of 27 countries, the impact of financial inclusion on happiness index looks to change with a country's level of income. On the macroeconomic level, gross domestic product (GDP) improves the happiness index for the individual under certain conditions. Thus, GDP on 0.25th quantile levels positively and significantly impacts the HIR for leader countries.

Empirical evidence suggests that macro-economic variables and the labor market proxies of the countries play a key role in determining HIR as well.

The study extends the literature on developed countries and suggestions a particular perspective on the relationship between economic outcomes and happiness index. This study offers two main originalities: it simultaneously examines the “happiness-macroeconomic level” and “happiness-employment status dimension”, and it uses a quantile regression approach, including financial inclusion variation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between banking crises and the subjective well-being of individuals. In addition, the authors examine the transmission of crises from the banking sector to well-being and show that negative financial shocks have significant adverse effects.

The authors employ agent-based modeling to test for the direct and indirect welfare effects of banking crises. The model includes a support vector machine (SVM) optimized subjective well-being function. The existing literature suggests that this is influenced by both the negative psychological effects of recessions and the adverse economic effects of income loss and increased unemployment.

The authors show that the different choices of policy response to a banking crisis carry different opportunity costs in terms of welfare and that societal preferences should be taken into account. The authors demonstrate that these effects influence different population classes in an asymmetric manner. Finally, the results demonstrate that the welfare loss of a bank failure is much higher than the cost of a bailout.

The authors are able to propose to the authorities the best policy mix in order to handle banking crises in the most adequate manner, according to society's preferences between financial stability and public goods.

The findings extend the existing literature on subjective well-being, by quantifying the welfare cost of banking crises and showing that authorities should reconsider bank bailouts as a policy solution to bank distress.

The originality of this article lies in the use of an agent-based model to model the relationship between societal well-being and financial stability. Also, the authors extend existing agent-based methodologies to include machine learning optimization techniques.

The article offers an empirical investigation of the incidence and scale of household marriage overspending around the world, and the governments' reaction once the problem emerges.

This study relies on regression analysis of open source data from legislation, mass media, and judiciary hearings for 141 countries. In the Phase 1 logistic regression of cross-country large-N data is used to identify country-incidence of marriage cost escalation. In the Phase 2 ordered logistic regression is used to uncover statistically significant factors that predict the probability of alternative government reactions in 87 countries which experience marriage cost escalation.

In a strong collectivist sociocultural environment, driven by informality, the rise of middle classes, combined with the decline of traditional hierarchies, and limited opportunities for economic mobility motivates households to enter emulative wedding spending, thus leading to overspending. Governments' reaction depends on available policy resources, and the economic scale of the problem.

The research findings suggest that rising living standards in the developing countries are more likely to escalate wedding costs, and consequently reinforce traditional values.

Academic literature links marriage-related overspending to armed insurgency, child marriage and decreasing state efficiency. Despite the problem's scope, existing research has not comprehensively addressed both its causes, and cross-country differences in government reactions to it. The article addresses both of the mentioned gaps, by offering a conceptual model of marriage cost escalation.