EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Subjective Well-being and Partnership Dynamics; Are Same-Sex Relationships Different?

Shuai Chen and Jan (J.C.) van Ours ()
Additional contact information
Jan (J.C.) van Ours: Erasmus School of Economics; Tinbergen Institute, The Netherlands

No 17-088/V, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: Partnered individuals are happier than singles. This can be because partnership leads to more satisfactory subjective well-being or because happier people are more likely to find a partner. We analyze Dutch panel data to investigate whether there is a causal effect of partnership on subjective well-being. Our data allow us to distinguish between marriage and cohabitation and between same-sex partnerships and opposite-sex ones. Our results support the short-term crisis model and adaptation theory. We find that marital partnership improves well-being and that these benefits are homogeneous to sexual orientation. The well-being gains of marriage are larger than those of cohabitation. Investigating partnership formation and disruption, we discover that the well-being effects are symmetric. Finally, we find that marriage improves well-being for both younger and older cohorts while cohabitation only benefits younger cohort.

Keywords: Subjective well-being; Happiness; Marriage; Cohabitation; Sexual orientation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/17088.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Subjective Well-being and Partnership Dynamics: Are Same-Sex Relationships Different? (2018) Downloads
Working Paper: Subjective Well-being and Partnership Dynamics; Are Same-sex Relationships Different? (2017) Downloads
Working Paper: Subjective Well-Being and Partnership Dynamics: Are Same-Sex Relationships Different? (2017) Downloads
Working Paper: Subjective Well-being and Partnership Dynamics; Are Same-sex Relationships Different? (2017) Downloads
Working Paper: Subjective Well-being and Partnership Dynamics; Are Same-sex Relationships Different? (2017) Downloads
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:tin:wpaper:20170088

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().

 
Page updated 2024-11-02
Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20170088