Testing Happiness Hypothesis among the Elderly

Alejandro Cid (), Daniel Ferres and Maximo Rossi

No 1207, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON

Abstract: A growing strand of economic literature focuses its attention on the relationship between happiness levels and various individual and socioeconomic variables. Recent studies analyze the impact of income, marital status, health, educational levels and other socioeconomic variables on satisfaction with life. A large majority of these studies limit their attention to industrialized countries. In our work, we analyze data for a group of individuals living in a Latin American country (Uruguay) with age 60 or older. We use a rich data set that allows us to test different happiness hypothesis employing four methodological approaches. We find that older people in Uruguay have a tendency to report themselves happy when they are married, when they have higher standards of health and when they earn higher levels of income or they feel their income is suitable for their standard of living. On the contrary, they report lower levels of happiness when they live alone and when their nutrition is insufficient. We also find that education has no clear impact on happiness. We think that our study is an initial contribution to the study of those factors that can explain happiness among the elderly in Latin American countries. Future work will focus on enhanced empirical analysis and in extending our study to other countries.

Keywords: Happiness; Health; Family; Censored Econometric Models; Semiparametric Methods; Treatment Evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C24 I10 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2007-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hap and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/2079 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Testing Happiness Hypothesis among the Elderly (2018)
Journal Article: Testing Happiness Hypothesis among the Elderly (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ude:wpaper:1207

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