Well-Being over the Life Span: Semiparametric Evidence from British and German Longitudinal Data

By Christoph Wunder, Andrea Wiencierz, J. Schwarze, Helmut Küchenhoff. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper applies semiparametric regression models using penalized splines to investigate the profile of well-being over the life span. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), the analysis shows a common, and quite similar, age-specific pattern of life satisfaction for both Britain and Germany that can be characterized by three age stages. The evidence suggests that the U-shaped profile is a good approximation of decreasing and increasing well-being in the first and second stage. After people reached their late 60s, however, a decline in well-being is found in the third stage.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4227c6ed5e85b25d75ad5512c34909fe9f048b73

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

1. P. Frijters
2. Richard A. Easterlin
3. Sarah Brown
4. Daniel Gray

In Health

1. P. Frijters
2. Daniel Gray
3. Sarah Brown

In Social Psychology

1. T. Beatton
2. P. Frijters
3. Richard A. Easterlin
4. John Knight
5. Anke C. Plagnol
6. Andrew E. Clark
7. Sarah Brown
8. Daniel Gray

Citations in the corpus

• The mystery of the U-shaped relationship between happiness and age (2012, background): “Wunder et al. (2009) hence include a fourth-order polynomial of age in their happiness regressions, where they find that the higher order terms are also significant and hence that the U-shape is not a perfect description of the actual relationships (they find a clear negative slope at the very high ”