Back to Baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the BHPS

Andrew Clark and Yannis Georgellis ()

No 6426, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We look for evidence of adaptation in well-being to major life events using eighteen waves of British panel data. Adaptation to marriage, divorce, birth of a child and widowhood appears to be rapid and complete, whereas this is not the case for unemployment. These findings are remarkably similar to those in previous work on German panel data. Equally, the time profiles with life satisfaction as the well-being measure are very close to those using a twelve-item scale of psychological functioning. As such, the phenomenon of adaptation may be a general one, rather than being only found in German data or using single-item well-being measures.

Keywords: life satisfaction; anticipation; adaptation; labour market and life events; baseline satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J12 J13 J63 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2012-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Economica, 2013, 80 (319), 496–512

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6426.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Back to baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the BHPS (2010)
Working Paper: Back to baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the BHPS (2010)
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:iza:izadps:dp6426

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().