The Intergenerational Correlation of Subjective Well-Being

There are many estimates of the intergenerational transmission of income and education, even though these may be considered as only partial measures of individual welfare. We here analyse long-running UK panel data and directly consider the intergenerational transmission of two widely-used indicators of well-being, life satisfaction and psychological distress. We use the long-run nature of this panel data to construct parent–child dyads who are observed at the same age, and so avoid the life-cycle bias that appears in much existing work on intergenerational correlation. We find that well-being is transmitted across generations, but to a lesser extent than are income and education. Observed economic outcomes only slightly mediate this relationship, and the estimated transmission is similar across different types of parents and children. Exploiting the panel structure of the data, where both parents and their children are observed repeatedly over time, we show that well-being is transmitted across generations not only in levels, but also in terms of the way in which it changes over the life cycle.