How the wellbeing function varies with age: the importance of income, health and social relations over the lifecycle

IF 1.6 3区 经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS Economica Pub Date : 2024-05-08 DOI:10.1111/ecca.12528
Jürgen Bitzer, Erkan Gören, Heinz Welsch
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Abstract

Previous literature has identified income, health status and social relationships as the most important predictors of subjective wellbeing (SWB). In addition, the literature has identified a non-linear relationship between age and SWB, with a dip in SWB in midlife. Explanations of the non-linear age–SWB relationship include the notion of unmet aspirations and the idea that people's emotional response to the drivers of SWB changes with age. Against this background, we use representative longitudinal data for Germany (1992–2019) with about 570,000 observations for more than 88,000 individuals aged 16–105 years to investigate if and how the association between SWB and its main predictors changes over the lifecycle. Using fixed effects estimation to control for cohort effects and unobserved personal characteristics, we find that the marginal effects of income and social relationships vary with age in a wave-like fashion, while the positive marginal effect of good health status increases monotonically and progressively with age. Our results are similar for alternative measures of SWB (life satisfaction and living in misery), and for men and women separately. The age-related changes in the importance of income and social relationships for SWB found in this paper help to explain the relationship between age and SWB found in previous literature.

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福祉功能如何随年龄变化:收入、健康和社会关系在生命周期中的重要性
以往的文献指出,收入、健康状况和社会关系是预测主观幸福感(SWB)的最重要因素。此外,文献还发现年龄与主观幸福感之间存在非线性关系,中年时主观幸福感会下降。对年龄与主观幸福感非线性关系的解释包括:未满足的愿望和人们对主观幸福感驱动因素的情绪反应会随着年龄的增长而变化。在此背景下,我们利用德国具有代表性的纵向数据(1992-2019 年),对年龄在 16-105 岁之间的 88,000 多人进行了约 57 万次观察,研究了 SWB 及其主要预测因素之间的关系是否以及如何随着生命周期的变化而变化。通过使用固定效应估计来控制同龄人效应和未观察到的个人特征,我们发现收入和社会关系的边际效应随着年龄的增长而呈波浪式变化,而良好健康状况的正边际效应则随着年龄的增长而单调递增。对于 SWB 的其他衡量指标(生活满意度和生活在痛苦中)以及男性和女性,我们的结果也是相似的。本文所发现的收入和社会关系对全部门预算的重要性随年龄而发生的变化,有助于解释以往文献中发现的年龄与全部门预算之间的关系。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Economica
Economica ECONOMICS-
CiteScore
2.40
自引率
0.00%
发文量
49
审稿时长
5 weeks
期刊介绍: Economica is an international journal devoted to research in all branches of economics. Theoretical and empirical articles are welcome from all parts of the international research community. Economica is a leading economics journal, appearing high in the published citation rankings. In addition to the main papers which make up each issue, there is an extensive review section, covering a wide range of recently published titles at all levels.
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