Unhappy Regions and Cities? Urban Agglomeration and Individual Happiness in Spain

ABSTRACT This paper examines how individual subjective well‐being varies across space in Spain, with a particular focus on the roles of city size and long‐term population growth. Using individual‐level data from multiple waves of the Spanish Centre for Sociological Research surveys between 2013 and 2025, adjusted measures of area‐level happiness are first constructed to document spatial differences in well‐being after accounting for observable individual characteristics and sampling error. These estimates reveal persistent spatial disparities in well‐being across municipalities and provinces. The individual‐level analysis then examines how population size is associated with subjective well‐being. Population agglomeration is negatively associated with individual happiness at the municipal level, but not at the provincial level, and the negative association is stronger among larger municipalities, reaching its greatest magnitude in the largest municipalities. Complementary analyses using continuous municipal population and long‐term population growth, available for the municipality‐identified subsample of relatively large municipalities, show that population size is negatively associated with well‐being, whereas long‐term population growth is positively associated with well‐being, but only for municipalities experiencing above‐median growth, indicating a non‐linear relationship between population dynamics and happiness. These results suggest that population growth may be associated with higher well‐being when it occurs in municipalities that were initially smaller and remain below the upper end of the population‐size distribution, whereas further growth in already large cities may be accompanied by greater congestion and other urban disamenities. Overall, the findings suggest that the relationship between urban agglomeration and subjective well‐being depends both on the spatial scale at which agglomeration is measured and on the stage of urban development.