Seasonality and the female happiness paradox

David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2024, vol. 58, issue 1, No 1, 33 pages

Abstract: Abstract Most studies tracking wellbeing do not collect data across all the months in a year. This leads to error in estimating gender differences in wellbeing for three reasons. First, there are seasonal patterns in wellbeing (particularly life satisfaction and happiness) which are gendered, so failure to account for those confounds estimates of gender differences over time. Second, studies fielded in discrete parts of the year cannot extrapolate to gender differences in other parts of the year. Making inferences about trends over time is particularly problematic when a survey changes its field survey dates across years. Third, without monthly data, surveys miss big shifts in wellbeing that occur for short periods. This is a problem because women’s wellbeing is more variable over short periods of time than men’s wellbeing. It also bounces back faster. We show that simply splitting the data by months in a happiness equation generates a positive male coefficient in one subset of months from September to January and a negative coefficient in months February to August. Such a split has no impact on the male coefficients in an anxiety equation. Months matter.

Keywords: Happiness; Unhappiness; Anxiety; Life satisfaction; COVID; Gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11135-023-01628-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:qualqt:v:58:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1007_s11135-023-01628-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11135-023-01628-5

Access Statistics for this article

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology is currently edited by Vittorio Capecchi

More articles in Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().