Life Satisfaction and Longevity: Longitudinal Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel

Cahit Guven () and Saloumidis Rudy
Additional contact information
Saloumidis Rudy: Deakin University,Geelong, Australia

German Economic Review, 2014, vol. 15, issue 4, 453-472

Abstract: We investigate the relationship between life satisfaction and mortality using the German Socio-Economic Panel, which allows us to follow around 15,000 people for more than two decades. Seventeen per cent of the respondents surveyed in 1984 died between 1984 and 2007. After controlling for initial health conditions, we find that people’s life satisfaction at the beginning of the survey is deeply linked to their life expectancy: a ten per cent increase in life satisfaction is connected to a four per cent decline in the probability of death in the period studied. The relationship between life satisfaction and mortality is stronger for the married and the men but life satisfaction does not matter for the women. We find some suggestive evidence that links between life satisfaction and mortality could be operating via accidents and mental health. Finally, we show that the life satisfaction measured in 1984 extends to the rest of life: people who were happier in 1984 more frequently experienced high levels of happiness in the rest of their lives. These results suggest that life satisfaction is a powerful risk-factor for later mortality and is more predictive of mortality than a host of other variables.

Keywords: Germany; life satisfaction; mortality; health; longitudinal data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/geer.12024 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Journal Article: Life Satisfaction and Longevity: Longitudinal Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel (2014)
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:bpj:germec:v:15:y:2014:i:4:p:453-472

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ger/html

DOI: 10.1111/geer.12024

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Peter Egger, Almut Balleer, Jesus Crespo-Cuaresma, Mario Larch, Aderonke Osikominu and Georg Wamser

More articles in German Economic Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().