Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/57539
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
Papers on Economics and Evolution No. 1108
Publisher: 
Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena
Abstract: 
Subjective well-being is a complex phenomenon coevolving with events in important domains of life. Panel vector autoregressions are a suitable tool to analyze the underlying structure of changes in happiness and its coevolution with changes in income, health, worries, marital status and employment status. With this technique we can simultaneously analyze the impact of the aforementioned factors on each other for the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data set. We find that positive changes in the named life domains are followed by decreases in subjective well-being (except for health, which is followed by well-being increases). Moreover, positive changes in well-being are followed by positive changes in most life domains. These findings are robust to different model specifications and comparable to similar findings for the British populace. We also examine how the structure of happiness differs with respect to different Big Five personality traits. Personality plays an important role, especially with regard to high traits of Neuroticism and Extraversion.
Subjects: 
subjective well-being
happiness
vector autoregressions
SOEP
personality traits
JEL: 
I12
I31
C33
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
462.22 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.