Happiness and Age Cycles - Return to Start...? On the Functional Relationship between Subjective Well-Being and Age

Previous happiness research has explicitly assumed that subjective well-being is U-shaped in age. This paper sheds new light on this issue testing several functional forms. Using micro data from the World Values Survey on 44 000 persons in 30 economically advanced OECD countries with long life expec...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Fischer, Justina A.V.
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Paris OECD Publishing 2009
Series:OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: OECD Books and Papers - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
LEADER 01579nma a2200241 u 4500
001 EB001830904
003 EBX01000000000000000997350
005 00000000000000.0
007 cr|||||||||||||||||||||
008 180616 ||| eng
100 1 |a Fischer, Justina A.V. 
245 0 0 |a Happiness and Age Cycles - Return to Start...?  |h Elektronische Ressource  |b On the Functional Relationship between Subjective Well-Being and Age  |c Justina A.V., Fischer 
260 |a Paris  |b OECD Publishing  |c 2009 
300 |a 42 p.  |c 21 x 29.7cm 
653 |a Social Issues/Migration/Health 
041 0 7 |a eng  |2 ISO 639-2 
989 |b OECD  |a OECD Books and Papers 
490 0 |a OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 
028 5 0 |a 10.1787/220573570724 
856 4 0 |a oecd-ilibrary.org  |u https://doi.org/10.1787/220573570724  |x Verlag  |3 Volltext 
082 0 |a 304 
082 0 |a 610 
520 |a Previous happiness research has explicitly assumed that subjective well-being is U-shaped in age. This paper sheds new light on this issue testing several functional forms. Using micro data from the World Values Survey on 44 000 persons in 30 economically advanced OECD countries with long life expectancies, we reveal a hyperbolic functional form. We find that life satisfaction reaches another local maximum around the age of 83, with a level identical to that of a 26-year old. This hyperbolic well-beingage relation is robust to the inclusion of cohort effects. We test this relationship for each OECD country separately, and corroborate the functional form using a sample of non-OECD countries