IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v74y2022i3p746-772..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The persistence of unhappiness: trapped into despair?
[Estimation of dynamic nonlinear random effects models with unbalanced panels]

Author

Listed:
  • Lionel Wilner

Abstract

This article investigates whether self-assessed states of unhappiness are persistent. To disentangle state dependence from unobserved heterogeneity in life satisfaction, it estimates a dynamic ordered Logit with correlated random effects on longitudinal data in France, the UK, Australia, and Germany. The persistence of life satisfaction is found to be heterogeneous; people already happy with their lives tend to remain happy while unhappiness sounds more transitory. Overall, there is no empirical evidence of unhappiness traps: rather, every individual faces the risk of experiencing some temporary spell of low subjective well-being in her life course.

Suggested Citation

  • Lionel Wilner, 2022. "The persistence of unhappiness: trapped into despair? [Estimation of dynamic nonlinear random effects models with unbalanced panels]," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 74(3), pages 746-772.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:74:y:2022:i:3:p:746-772.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpab055
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:74:y:2022:i:3:p:746-772.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.