Happiness, religiosity and economic hardship: cross-national evidence on household financial position

Purpose This study examines how happiness, religiosity and recent economic hardship are jointly associated with household financial position across countries. It addresses limited cross-national evidence on how subjective well-being and religiosity relate to household financial position under conditions of material hardship. Design/methodology/approach Individual-level data are drawn from Wave 7 of the World Values Survey (2017–2022) across 64 countries. Household financial position is measured on a four-category ordinal scale ranging from spending savings and borrowing to saving money. Mixed-effects ordered logit models with country-level random intercepts and random income slopes are estimated using a baseline sample of 84,765 respondents. Robustness analyses employ alternative measures of religiosity, economic hardship and household financial position, together with alternative country treatments, model specifications and sample-composition checks. Findings Higher happiness is consistently associated with a more favourable household financial position, including lower predicted probabilities of spending savings and borrowing and higher probabilities of saving money. Religiosity has no statistically significant direct association in the baseline model, while the negative happiness × religiosity interaction indicates that the positive happiness association becomes weaker as religiosity increases. Economic hardship is strongly associated with less favourable household financial position, while the positive economic hardship × religiosity interaction indicates that this adverse association becomes less pronounced at higher levels of religiosity. Heterogeneity tests show greater cross-group variation in the economic hardship × religiosity association than in the happiness × religiosity association. Originality/value The study integrates subjective well-being, religiosity and recent economic hardship within a cross-national analysis of household financial position. It provides large-scale evidence on their direct and conditional associations and shows that religiosity is particularly relevant to variation in the relationships of happiness and economic hardship with household financial position.