Happiness and age cycles – return to start…

Justina A. V. Fischer

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Previous happiness research has explicitly assumed that subjective well-being is U-shaped in age. This paper sheds new light on this issue testing several functional forms. Using micro data from the World Values Survey on 44’000 persons in 30 economically well-developed OECD countries with long life expectancies, we reveal that age follows a hyperbolic form. We find that life satisfaction reaches another local maximum around the age of 83, with a level identical to that of a 26-years old. This hyperbolic well-being-age relation is robust to the inclusion of cohort effects. We corroborate the functional form using a sample of non-OECD countries.

Keywords: Subjective Well-Being; cohorts; happiness; aging; life-course; OECD; WVS; cross-national; life satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C51 I31 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-02-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hap and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:15249

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