Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
June 15, 2013
Summary:
Bad health decreases individuals’ happiness, but few studies measure the impact of specific illnesses. We apply matching estimators to examine how changes in different (objective) conditions of bad health affect subjective well-being for a sample of 100,265 observations from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) database (1996e2006). The strongest effect is for alcohol and drug abuse, followed by anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses, stroke and cancer. Adaptation to health impairments varies across health impairments. There is also a puzzling asymmetry: strong adverse reactions to deteriorations in health appear alongside weak increases in well-being after health improvements. In conclusion, our analysis offers a more detailed account of how bad health influences happiness than accounts focusing on how bad self-assessed health affects individual well-being.
Published in
Social Science and Medicine
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 87 , p.155 -167
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.03.025
ISSN
2779536
Subjects
Notes
Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to Univ. Essex registered users*
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