Sex better than cash in the happiness stakes - World - www.smh.com.au

Sex better than cash in the happiness stakes - World - www.smh.com.au

If you work long hours in hopes of a pay rise, you may want to consider going home early and jumping in the sack.

Increasing sex frequency from once a month to at least once a week provides as much happiness as a $US50,000 ($63,000) a year rise, says a paper titled "Money, Sex and Happiness: an Empirical Study," submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research, one of the leading organisations in its field.

The findings come from two economists, David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England, who are leaders in a growing field known as "happiness economics", which includes research on how things like unemployment or the position of an employee's desk affect happiness. "People are interested in questions about what gives people satisfaction," Dr Blanchflower said. "We, as economists, look at money and marriage, and the obvious thing is to keep going."

In their 2004 study, Dr Blanchflower analysed

Link to paper itself