The Declining Mental Health Of The Young And The Global Disappearance Of The Hump Shape In Age In Unhappiness
David Blanchflower,
Alex Bryson and
Xiaowei Xu
No 32337, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
Across many studies subjective well-being follows a U-shape in age, declining until people reach middle-age, only to rebound subsequently. Ill-being follows a mirror-imaged hump-shape. But this empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic decrease in illbeing by age. The reason for the change is the deterioration in young people’s mental health both absolutely and relative to older people. We reconsider evidence for this fundamental change in the link between illbeing and age with micro data for the United States and the United Kingdom. Beginning around 2011 there is a monotonic and declining cross-sectional association between well-being and age. In the UK the recent COVID pandemic exacerbated the trends by impacting most heavily on the wellbeing of the young, but this was not the case in the United States. We replicate the decrease in illbeing by age across 34 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, using five ill-being metrics for the period 2020-2024 and confirm the findings.
JEL-codes: I31 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-hea and nep-ltv
Note: CH LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32337.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
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:nbr:nberwo:32337
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32337
The price is Paper copy available by mail.
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().