Happiness and Economics
Fengyu Wu is a research associate at the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Southern California and a B.S. in economics from the Singapore Management University. Her research centers on the economics of happiness, health economics, development economics, and political economy. She studies the determinants of subjective well-being in populations around the world, in particular, the effects of both economic and social conditions, including among others: income, consumption, interpersonal comparisons, supportive relationships, and social capital. She also investigates the factors that influence individuals’ socioeconomic attitudes and political preferences, with special attention on identifying and explaining differences between men and women.
Wu has been teaching student seminars on the social science of happiness at Wake Forest University. She is one of the founding members of the China Happiness Report, and she also contributed to the World Happiness Report 2021.
With a focus on happiness from the economic perspective, Dr. Wu's Athenaeum talk is part of a 3-part series on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Happiness co-sponsored by the Berger Institute at CMC.