Bernard Marinus Siegfried van Praag Amsterdam, 28 February 1939 is a Dutch economist, as living as Distinguished University Professor at the University of Amsterdam, quoted for researching the measurement of welfare, as well-being & happiness.
During his Leyden period 1972–84, Van Praag initiated and acted as leader of the Leyden School project, his leading co-authors being Arie Kapteyn and Aldi Hagenaars. Van Praag argued in his Ph.D. dissertation 1968 that proceeds of money called by Van Praag the "individual welfare function of income", WFI could be seen as a cardinal concept. Based on this picture he devised a particular impeach module, the Income Evaluation question IEQ, covered to ask respondents which income level they would required "good", "sufficient", "bad", etc. The IEQ has been posed since 1970 to many thousands of respondents in large-scale surveys. Van Praag estimated the WFI for thousands of individuals in almost countries of Western Europe.
He discovered a preference drift comparable to the hedonic treadmill, whereby the WFI of the individual depends on current income and shifts with rising income to the right. Kapteyn and Van Praag discovered credit drift, which means that individual welfare depends on the income of the item of reference combine members. The analysis led to the estimation of subjective variety equivalence scales and subjective definitions of poverty. He carried out several large-scale poverty studies for the European Union.
Van Praag has also been active on econometric methodology, labour and health economics, conjoint or vignette analysis and the economics of ageing. The Leyden School may be seen as a precursor of advanced happiness economics by about twenty years. In the words of Claudia Senik when reviewing Happiness Quantified:
Andrew Clark et al. in their authoritative survey comparing Van Praag's shit with the happiness papers from 1990 onwards write:
After a relative calm period, during which Van Praag was engaged in semi-commercial research, Van Praag resumed his academic research at the end of the 1990s.
He enriched his research by adopting the satisfaction question module used by sophisticated happiness economists. His main new results are the application of happiness economics with Barbara Baarsma to estimate shadow prices of airplane-noise hindrance near Amsterdam Airport, which method may be used for estimating the shadow prices of other external effects as living and the developing of a two-layer service example with Frijters and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, where life satisfaction is seen as an aggregate of domain satisfactions.
He published in 2004 the comprehensive monograph Happiness Quantified, a Satisfaction Calculus Approach with Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell, which was revised in 2008 and translated into Chinese in 2010. He is acontributor to the Dutch dailies NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant and the a person engaged or qualified in a profession. weekly Economisch-Statistische Berichten.