Browsing by Author "Zapata, Oscar"
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Item Green Spaces with Fewer People Improve Self-Reported Affective Experience and Mood(MDPI, 2023) Honey-Rosés, Jordi; Zapata, OscarCalm and quiet green spaces provide health benefits for urban residents. Yet as cities become more densely populated, increasing public users to green spaces may reduce or moderate these benefits. We examine how increased pedestrian density in a green street changes self-reported wellbeing. We use a between subject experimental design that added public users as confederates in randomly selected periods over three weeks. We collect data on mood and affective response from pedestrians moving through the green street (n = 504), with and without our public user treatment in randomly selected periods. Mood and affective response are improved when experiencing the green street with fewer people. We find that an increased number of public users in the green space has a negative effect on mood, especially among women. We provide experimental evidence that self-reported wellbeing in urban green spaces depends on social context, and that there are gender inequities associated with changes in affective response. Although we only measure immediate impacts, our results imply that the health benefits of green spaces may be limited by the total number of users. This research contributes additional evidence that greener cities are also healthier cities, but that the benefits may not be equally shared between women and men and will depend on the social context of use.Item Unequally happy: happiness inequality across satisfaction domainsin a developing-country context(Springer, 2024) Zapata, OscarSubjective measures of well-being, such as happiness, occupy a rapidly growing body in the academic literature. However, how happiness levels are distributed across populations and social groups is less well known, especially in the context of developing countries. In this paper, I study happiness inequality at the district level in Ecuador, considering diverse domains of individual satisfaction. Concretely, I calculate Gini coefficients for happiness domains and identify the determinants of happiness inequality levels using a panel dataset for 584 districts over three years. The findings show that happiness inequality is lower regarding overall satisfaction and satisfaction with marital status and social life and higher regarding work and financial conditions, and the government. The results also suggest that average happiness level and income inequality are consistent determinants of happiness inequality. Lastly, I divide the sample by gender, place of residence, ethnicity and education levels to explore the differences across population groups. Policy discussion and implications follow the quantitative analysis.