Need help with dissertation on GDP??

Dancingjebus3

Hey I am currently working on my dissertation at the moment and I am the stage where some econometrics is needed, Iv had a look around online for resources but there is a lot out there so I am not too sure what to use.
Basically what I am trying to do is to find out what factors influence happiness and well being in an economy and at what level to they have an effect. The idea is to maybe include or exclude things in GDP per capita that affect or do not affect well being. The results will hopefully indicate what sort of policy decisions can be used to increase a populations happiness, with the example of income we can see that it only affects happiness up to 15,000 euro then after that it is only our income relative to others that affect happiness. I will continue my hunt on trying to find out what the best way to approach this is but if anyone can offer any help it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Might be a good start if you haven't already seen it.

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/staff/person.asp?id=970

Flamed Diving

There is surely a considerable volume of literature on this subject.

Dancingjebus3

Thanks but yes I have read Layards book and some of his papers already and I am aware there is a considerable amount of literature on the topic as I have looked into a great deal of it. But my issue is not with the literature but is with how to construct an economic analysis from what I have studied. I know that only I know what I have read but I am looking for advice on what is the best possible way for me to go about constructing this analysis and where to get the raw data from to run regressions and be able to test hypothesis's?

Flamed Diving

Dancingjebus3 wrote: »

Thanks but yes I have read Layards book and some of his papers already and I am aware there is a considerable amount of literature on the topic as I have looked into a great deal of it. But my issue is not with the literature but is with how to construct an economic analysis from what I have studied. I know that only I know what I have read but I am looking for advice on what is the best possible way for me to go about constructing this analysis and where to get the raw data from to run regressions and be able to test hypothesis's?

Ah, now I understand. Are you undergrad or postgrad? The data is always tricky, no matter what paper you are writing, I heard good things about this crowd:

http://issda.ucd.ie/

or

http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/

A book I would recommend is J. Scott Long's 'Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables', however that might be too advanced for an undergrad.

Best person for this is Andrew Oswald - he is based in Warwick and has spent most of his career looking at that!

http://ideas.repec.org/e/pos21.html is his repec page. His papers are very readable and the econometrics is not too severe.