Why We Should Look at People's Subjective Wellbeing to Evaluate Behavioural Public Policies, and How to Do It

We make the case for why we should look at people's subjective wellbeing (or happiness) when evaluating the impacts of behavioural public policies. Whilst not perfect, we argue that wellbeing data contain important informational value and have the necessary properties to base statistical inference on. We then show how to do it, by proposing different wellbeing measures suitable as outcomes in lab and field experiments, by illustrating how to integrate them into randomised controlled trials (RCTs), and by alerting the reader what to pay attention to. As a direct measure of overall welfare, wellbeing data are not only a useful screening tool to detect unintended consequences but also allow analysts to appraise the "full" impacts of behavioural public policies. They open up many new avenues for analysis, for example cost-benefit analysis (CBA) when translating wellbeing impacts into their monetary equivalent values.