The Relationship between Happiness, Health and Socio-economic Factors: Results Based on Swedish Micro Data

Ulf-G. Gerdtham and Magnus Johannesson

No 207, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between happiness (utility) and a host of socio-economic variables. The data set consists of a random sample of over 5,000 individuals from the Swedish adult population. Happiness is measured by a three-point categorical measure of overall happiness (not happy, happy sometimes, happy most of the time), and an ordered probit model is used to econometrically estimate the happiness equation. The results are consistent with the theoretical predictions and show that happiness increases with income and education and decreases with unemployment, urbanisation, being single, and male gender. The relationship between age and happiness is U-shaped, with happiness being lowest in the age-group 45-64.

Keywords: Happiness; utility; health; socioeconomic factors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 I12 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 1997-11-21
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0207.pdf.zip (application/pdf)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0207.pdf (application/pdf)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0207.ps.zip (application/postscript)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0207.ps (application/postscript)

Related works:
Journal Article: The relationship between happiness, health, and socio-economic factors: results based on Swedish microdata (2001)
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:hhs:hastef:0207

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin (helena.lundin@hhs.se).