Happy Times: Measuring Happiness Using Response Times

Surveys that measure subjective states like happiness or preferences often generate discrete ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are commonly used to analyze such data, suffer from an identification problem. Their conclusions depend strongly on assumptions about the distribution of a latent variable. In this paper, we propose using survey response times to solve that problem. Response times contain information about the distribution of the latent variable even among subjects who give the same survey response, through a chronometric effect. Using an online survey, we test and verify the existence of the chronometric effect. We then provide theoretical conditions that allow us to test conventional distributional assumptions. While these assumptions are rejected in some cases, overall our evidence seems to be consistent with the qualitative validity of the coefficients estimated using the conventional model.