The latest Bloomberg Businessweek features an article from Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development about the tangible value of optimism and happiness.

Just as Western pessimism is excessive, perhaps the developing world is too optimistic. However, research suggests overoptimism is a considerably better characteristic to possess than the opposite.

Research by Manju Puri and David Robinson at Duke University finds that optimistic people work harder, get paid more, get elected to office more often, and win at sports more regularly. They even live longer. The effect of optimism spills over into business decisions. David Hirshleifer and colleagues at the University of California at Irvine studied chief executive officers who were confident enough in their own companies’ stock that they retained options after they could exercise them, further increasing their stake in their companies’ success. Such CEOs invested more in innovation, spending more on research and development, and their companies not only won more patents but also had more widely cited ones.

These studies are among others that have found people who are happier do better in terms of income and health. Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution looked at people who reported being happy in Russia in 1995. By 2000, the happier people had higher incomes than the less happy ones and were more likely to be in good health. The 2014 Pew survey suggested more than twice as many Russians were optimistic about their kids’ financial future than pessimistic. Given the collapse in oil prices and the value of the ruble that beset the Russian economy late in 2014, those high levels of optimism are going to be tested—but pessimism will only make things worse.

Over the short term, it’s unsurprising that fast economic growth makes people more optimistic. Over the long term—periods of 15 years—it appears that happiness and optimism are a driving force behind even stronger economic performance, encouraging risk, experimentation, and hard work, according to a cross-country analysis by Stefano Bartolini of the University of Siena.