Open AccessGiving more enhances your happiness: Evidence from Indonesia
Author(s) -
Radikal Yuda Utama,
Herman Palani,
Ahmad Zufar Rabbani
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
communications in humanities and social sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2807-5390
pISSN - 2775-2569
DOI - 10.21924/chss.1.1.2021.8
Subject(s) - happiness , prosocial behavior , indonesian , ordered probit , life satisfaction , estimation , subjective well being , social psychology , psychology , demographic economics , economics , econometrics , linguistics , philosophy , management
Previous studies revealed that consuming activities and spending money to meet needs can improve individuals’ happiness. Our study showed that spending money, not for personal needs also has a big impact on individuals’ well-being. We used 26,464 observations of 4th and 5th waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) to predict the expenditures for non-personal needs (known as prosocial expenditure) on one's subjective well-being. The estimation result of the probit model showed that pro-social expenditure had a positive correlation with subjective well-being. On average, those who spend more on charity are happier than people who spend less. We also found that prosocial expenditure among Muslim and non-Muslim observations had different effects on happiness and life satisfaction.