One potential reason: Higher earners feel an increased sense of control over life. To answer this question, Matthew Killingsworth, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, collected 1.7 million data points from more than 33,000 participants who provided in-the-moment snapshots of their feelings during daily life. In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Killingsworth confirms that money does influence happiness and, contrary to previous influential research on the subject suggesting that this plateaus above $75,000, there was no dollar value at which it stopped mattering to an individual’s well-being. Tracking happiness with an app