The programming committee for the 77th Annual SAM International Business Conference is pleased to announce the acceptance of the paper presentation Divorce Steals Happiness: A Macro Analysis on The Mediating Effects of Divorce on Income Level and Happiness, authored by Courtney Faulkner, Madeline Ortego, Eloise Ramey, and Stephanie Gapud from Spring Hill College.
Presentation Abstract: In the much-publicized divorce of Jack Welch, GE stakeholders found out that they were blindsided as to how much perks they were paying to maintain the lifestyle of their much-adored former CEO (Gallagher, 2005). Small businesses and large corporations alike are impacted by the divorce of the owners or of their CEO (Galbraith, 2003, Gallagher, 2005; Gonzales-Val & Marcen, 2017; Kourlis, 2012; Thaler, 2005;). People are often chasing the glamorous lifestyle of money and success, however, there should be a balance to achieving happiness and fulfillment (DeVoe & House 2012; Muresan, Ciumas, & Achim, 2020). “Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery” (Kahneman, 2010).
In this paper, we used published country data i.e., average income, happiness index, and divorce rate to quantitatively look if indeed divorce has an impact on happiness at the macro level. Correlations were run to find any significant relationships between income and happiness variables in the 20 random countries. The initial correlation showed that there is a positive correlation of average income on the overall happiness of individuals, however, the significance of this impact changed when the divorce rates variable was introduced into the equation. We used SmartPLS 3.3 to analyze the impact of divorce on happiness. Results and implications are discussed.
Join us online to see this great paper and many more March 31 – April 2, 2022. For registration information visit www.samnational.org/conference.