The Road from Money to Happiness

Gabriela Mihaela Mureșan,Melinda Timea Fülöp,Cristina Ciumaș

doi:10.3390/jrfm14100459

Gabriela Mihaela Mureșan, Melinda Timea Fülöp + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm14100459

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Abstract

Nowadays, companies must be concerned with the levels of satisfaction and happiness of employees. Hence, this paper proposes to investigate the links between salary and happiness through an exploratory study with a quasi-experimental design. The sample included 376 respondents, and we employed structured equation modeling (SEM) in ADANCO. Prior to evaluating the structural model, the goodness of fit shows moderate/excellent values. Our empirical results show a positive relationship between salary and happiness, salary and life satisfaction, salary and financial satisfaction, financial satisfaction and life satisfaction, and financial satisfaction and happiness. Thus, we consider that our research contributes to the literature by analyzing the relationship between income and happiness in a developing country such as Romania. Congruent with previous findings, we consider that our results provide evidence of the road from salary to happiness in developing countries.

Highlights

The relation between wealth and happiness has been discussed extensively in the academic literature (Easterlin 1974, 1995)
Given that many studies in the literature emphasize the importance of age and its influence on results (Hitka et al 2019, 2020, 2021), we want to note that we did not concern ourselves in this study with this aspect, due to the fact that the respondents involved had an age between 20–40 years; we covered several age categories and we considered that the analysis of different age categories would not be relevant
This paper presents the results of our study on the relationship between financial satisfaction, happiness, and life satisfaction

Summary

Introduction

The relation between wealth and happiness has been discussed extensively in the academic literature (Easterlin 1974, 1995). The results of the research in the literature indicate that additional income beyond a certain level does not have an enduring impact on the feeling of happiness/joy, because we as individuals are able to adapt to different situations (Killingsworth 2021; Frederick and Loewenstein 1999; Frey and Stutzer 2002; Kahneman and Deaton 2010; Stevenson and Wolfers 2013; Jebb et al 2018). There are many people in the world for whom the lack of money is a stress factor. Even economics is not about maximum income. It is about the well-being of the individual. There are people who are unhappy because they have a lot of time but no money.

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