Oil Rent: Joyful or Calamitous?

Achieving happiness has always been one of the goals of human societies, attracting the attention of many governors, scholars and researchers. In this regard, the link between oil revenues and happiness in oil-exporting countries is an important issue that has been little considered. In many internal and external studies, the relationship between the rents of oil revenues and many important economic variables, such as economic growth, has been investigated within the context of the resource curse hypothesis, but so far, the impact of oil rents on happiness has not been studied within the framework of the resource curse hypothesis. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine that how oil revenue rents affect happiness and is to test the resource curse hypothesis and the threshold impact of the oil rents on happiness in selected OPEC countries over the period of 2005-2016. For this purpose, using theoretical literature and applying the Threshold Panel method, the factors influencing happiness have been modeled. The results of the estimation of the research models have shown that the effect of oil on happiness is non-linear and threshold effect which it means that before the threshold of 43% of the ratio of oil rents to GDP, this variable has a significant positive impact on happiness, but so bypassing this threshold, the ratio of oil rents to GDP has had a significant negative impact on happiness in the OPEC countries.