Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

We evaluate the effect of institutional trust on life satisfaction across 27 countries during the period of 2008 Global Financial Crisis and period of recovery from the crisis. The main source of data is three rounds of cross-national survey covering 27 countries. The first round of the survey conducted in 2006 before the crisis, the second one conducted in 2010 after onset of the crisis, while the third one was conducted in 2016 during the recovery from the crisis. The survey micro data provide us with socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics including life satisfaction. Merging the micro data from three rounds of the survey with aggregated data from international sources (e.g. GDP per capita from the World Bank) allows us to create a rich database of potential determinants of life satisfaction. Using this database, we test the effect of changes in institutional trust on changes in life satisfaction during the crisis and after vis-à-vis other well-known predictors of life satisfaction.