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

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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 121 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.