The persistence of unhappiness: trapped into despair?

Lionel Wilner

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Abstract: This article investigates whether self-assessed states of unhappiness are persistent. To disentangle state dependence from unobserved heterogeneity in life satisfaction, it estimates a dynamic ordered Logit with correlated random effects on longitudinal data in France, the UK, Australia, and Germany. The persistence of life satisfaction is found to be heterogeneous; people already happy with their lives tend to remain happy while unhappiness sounds more transitory. Overall, there is no empirical evidence of unhappiness traps: rather, every individual faces the risk of experiencing some temporary spell of low subjective well-being in her life course.

Date: 2022-07-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04799394v1
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Published in Oxford Economic Papers, 2022, 74 (3), pp.746-772. ⟨10.1093/oep/gpab055⟩

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Journal Article: The persistence of unhappiness: trapped into despair? (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04799394

DOI: 10.1093/oep/gpab055

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