People who think of their immediate supervisor as more of a “partner” than a “boss” are significantly happier with their day-to-day lives and more satisfied with their lives overall, according to a new working paper by a team of Canadian and Korean economists.

For middle-aged workers, the difference between a partner-boss and a boss-boss works out to about 0.4 points on a 10-point life satisfaction scale. In the realm of happiness research, that’s huge: “equivalent in life satisfaction terms to more than a doubling of household income,” according to the paper. The researchers found similar effects for supervisors' influence on their workers' day-to-day happiness.

Over the years, happiness researchers have consistently found that happiness usually follows a U-shaped curve throughout the course of a person’s life. People are happy and satisfied with their lives when they’re young, but that starts to drop off considerably in middle age, when the competing pressures of work and child-rearing are likely in their greatest state of conflict. Only as people approach the later stages of their lives in their late 50s and beyond — when the kids move out and work starts to wind down — does happiness tend to start trending upward again…