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Social Indicators Research

Erschienen in:

01.11.2013

Predicting the Trend of Well-Being in Germany: How Much Do Comparisons, Adaptation and Sociability Matter?

verfasst von: Stefano Bartolini, Ennio Bilancini, Francesco Sarracino

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 2/2013

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Abstract

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the variation of subjective well-being experienced by Germans over the last two decades testing the role of some of the major correlates of people’s well-being. Our results suggest that the variation of Germans’ well-being between 1996 and 2007 is well predicted by changes over time of income, demographics and social capital. The increase in social capital predicts the largest positive change in subjective well-being. Income growth, also predicts a substantial change in subjective well-being, but it is compensated for about three fourths by the joint negative predictions due to income comparison and income adaptation. Finally, we find that aging of the population predicts the largest negative change in subjective well-being. This result appears to hinge on the large loss of satisfaction experienced by individuals in old age.

Nächster Artikel Evidence-Based Well-Being/Positive Psychology Assessment and Intervention with Quality of Life Therapy and Coaching and the Quality of Life Inventory (QOLI)

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See Dolan et al. (2008) for a recent survey on the determinants of subjective well-being.

Corazzini et al. (2011) show that also the perception of poverty is reference-based, with people in higher income countries giving more relevance to reference income.

See Bartolini and Bonatti (2008), Antoci et al. (2012), and Bilancini and D’Alessandro (2011) recent theoretical investigations on the role of social capital.

The data were extracted using the add-on package PanelWhiz v2.0 (Nov 2007) for Stata. PanelWhiz was written by Dr. John P. Haisken-DeNew (john@panelwhiz.eu). The PanelWhiz generated .do files to retrieve the SOEP data used here are available upon request to the authors. Any data or computational errors in this paper are our own. Please refer to Haisken-DeNew and Hahn (2010) for a detailed description of PanelWhiz.

For more details on the SOEP see Frick et al. (2007) and Wagner et al. (2007).

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As pointed out in Dolan et al. (2008), health is likely to be an important correlate of SWB. However, we cannot control for it in our regressions because the SOEP does not contain data on objective health. The SOEP does provide data on subjective health, but this variable has been shown to be a poor proxy of objective health (e.g., Kahneman and Riis 2005; Deaton 2008).

For more details about the tunnel effect see Hirschman (1973) or, more recently, Senik (2004) and Caporale et al. (2009).

In order to explore different non-linear relationships between age and SWB, we run further regressions where we include not only age and age squared, but also higher order variables. We found confirmation that in the very old age the relationship is strongly negative and concave.

See, e.g., Clark and Oswald (2006), Blanchflower and Oswald (2008) and references therein for a full list of contributions supporting the U-shape hypothesis in economics. See instead Mroczek and Spiro (2005) for a recent contribution in the psychological literature which also supports the U-shape hypothesis. Interestingly enough, Mroczek and Spiro (2005) find that the age of minimum SWB is greater than the one typically found by economists of about 20 years (in the 60s instead of the 40s).

See also Easterlin (2006) and Van Landeghem (2009) on this issue.

In this respect, Becchetti et al. (2008) do not provide any indication since they do not allow for a non-linear relationship between age and SWB.

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Titel: Predicting the Trend of Well-Being in Germany: How Much Do Comparisons, Adaptation and Sociability Matter?
verfasst von: Stefano Bartolini
Ennio Bilancini
Francesco Sarracino
Publikationsdatum: 01.11.2013
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 2/2013
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0142-5

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