INTRODUCTION Attaining the highest possible happiness is the utmost concern of both individual humans and human society. Happiness, as defned by the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, is generally understood as a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment, love, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy in life. As happiness is a state of feeling that encompasses all aspects of human life, a wide variety of biological, psychological, social, religious, and philosophical approaches have striven to defne happiness and identify its sources. Economics measures human well-being in terms of utility, progress, welfare, quality of life, well-being, or standard of living, mostly relating well-being to consumption, income, GDP, growth in GDP, economic growth, per capita income, or some other indicators like maximum utility, reduction in poverty, decrease in inequality, indicators of health, or indicators of environmental standards. Economics reduces happiness to yet another aspect of human behaviour that is related to material goods and services in that command over physical resources, simply money buys human happiness. DETERMINANTS OF HAPPINESS IN INDIA: TIME SERIES ORDERED PROBIT ESTIMATION OF SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING T. Lakshmanasamy ICSSR Senior Fellow and Formerly Professor, Department of Econometrics, University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Email: tlsamy@yahoo.co.in; tlsamy1960@gmail.com Journal of Organisation and Human Behaviour 10 (1 & 2) 2021, 11-20 http://publishingindia.com/johb/ Abstract Attaining the highest level of happiness is the utmost concern of individuals as well as the nations and the whole human society. Individuals feel happiness can be achieved by acquiring income and material perquisites. Though wealth and happiness are positively correlated within a society at a given point in time, in the long run, increasing the income of all in a country may not raise the happiness of all. This lack of a systematic long-run relationship between income and happiness is often due to social comparison, in which individuals evaluate their life satisfaction relative to others’ income. Using the WVS data for eight states of India for the period 1990–2006, this paper examines whether individuals’ happiness or life satisfaction is infuenced by their absolute income or by relative income. The estimated ordered probit results show that relative income matters more than individual absolute income for the happiness of individuals. An improvement in the income rank of an individual relative to the reference group will increase the individual happiness level. The results are consistent with the Easterlin paradox that social comparison explains the nill income-happiness relationship in the long run and only relative income/position matters for happiness more than absolute income. Keywords: Subjective Well-Being, Income Efect, Social Comparison, Reference Income, Absolute vs Relative Income, Income Rank, Ordered Probit Estimation But, psychologists frequently measure happiness by subjective well-being by self-reported levels of subjective life satisfaction. Positive psychology researchers use theoretical models that include describing happiness as consisting of positive emotions and positive activities, or that describe some kinds of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. While economists are concerned with objective measures of well-being, psychologists rely on self-reported subjective evaluations of life satisfaction. Research has identifed a number of attributes that correlate with happiness: personal relationships, social interaction, extraversion, marital status, employment, health, democratic freedom, optimism, endorphins released through physical exercise and eating chocolate, religious involvement, income and proximity to other happy people. Frey and Stutzer (2002) argue that “happiness is a ‘subjectivist’ measure of individual welfare and is much broader than the way individual utility is normally defned... while happiness is not derived from actual behaviour, it is systematically and closely connected with generally accepted manifestations of well-being”. Therefore, happiness, subjective well-being