Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

By Andrew E. Clark, E. Diener, Y. Georgellis, Richard E. Lucas. Social Science Research Network, 2008

1,213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals tend to return to some baseline level of well-being after life and labour market events? Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, we find significant lag and lead effects. We cannot reject the hypothesis of complete adaptation to marriage, divorce, widowhood, birth of child and layoff. However, there is little evidence of adaptation to unemployment for men. Men are somewhat more affected by labour market events (unemployment and layoffs) than are women but in general the patterns of anticipation and adaptation are remarkably similar by sex.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ceeccaa20deb3cd7787d6921694933255dd4f78d

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In General Health Professions

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In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Happiness at work (2017, methodology): “20 Our approach here follows Clark et al (2008) and Clark and Georgelis (2013).”
Beauty is the Promise of Happiness? (2011, neutral): “The Frey and Stutzer (2002) survey captured part of the literature, but there has been a continuing outpouring of research on happiness from an economic viewpoint (e.g., Clark et al, 2008; Stevenson and Wolfers, 2008; Deaton and Kahneman, 2010; Oswald and Wu, 2011).”
Interpretations of Utility and Their Implications for the Valuation of Health (2008, background): “In the case of unemployment, for example, average life satisfaction falls from around 7.2 on a scale from 1–10 to the 6.3 in the first year and is still only 6.5 in the fourth year of unemployment (Clark et al., 2004).”
Persistent pursuit of need-satisfying goals leads to increased happiness: A 6-month experimental longitudinal study (2010, background): “Lucas and colleagues have addressed the happiness change question using large-scale longitudinal data, showing that negative life events such as divorce, disability, or unemployment can have enduring negative effects on peoples’ happiness levels (e.g., Clark et al. 2008; Lucas et al. 2003, 2004; L”
The Concept of Subjective Well-being in Housing Research (2017, neutral): “To ensure that coefficients are somewhat comparable, we only look at those studies which i) used OLS, ii) controlled for fixed effects and iii) used either BHPS (Foye et al., 2017; Foye, 2016; Fujiwara, 2013, Clark and Georgellis, 2013) or GSOEP (Zumbro, 2014; Clark et al., 2008).”
How Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health? A Survey of the Longitudinal Evidence (2005, background): “Lucas et al (2003) and 12 Clark et al (2003) use German longitudinal data on 24,000 individuals to explore this, and do find some evidence of adaptation towards the set point or baseline.”
Personality and the marginal utility of income: Personality interacts with increases in household income to determine life satisfaction (2011, methodology): “In relation to well-being research, it is fairly clear that personality is one of the biggest and most consistent predictors of well-being (Diener and Lucas, 1999). Some authors estimate that between 44% and 52% of the variation in well-being is attributable to individual differences (Lykken and Tel”
Work, Jobs and Well-Being Across the Millennium (2009, methodology): “An ECONLIT search for journal articles with either 'Happiness', 'Life Satisfaction', 'Well-being' or 'Job Satisfaction' in the title, described in Clark et al. (2008 b ) identifies 614 published articles between 1960 and 2006.”
Is it Pleasure or Health from Leisure that We Benefit from Most? An Analysis of Well-Being Alternatives and Implications for Policy (2016, background): “…and Oswald, 2006), but there are dynamic effects involved, with well-being from bereavement recovering over about an 8 year span (Lucas et al. 2003); and that divorce reduces female well-being more than males, but that remarriage can imply a recovery of levels of well-being (Clark et al. 2008).”