Revisiting Cheerful Jane and Miserable John: the impact of income, good health, social contacts and education declines with increasing subjective well-being

ABSTRACT

This short note seeks to replicate the quantile regression analysis in Binder and Coad (2011), but taking into account individual-specific fixed effects (FE; using the British Household Panel Survey data set). It finds declining effects of the four main variables of interest (health, social life, income, education) over the quantiles of the subjective well-being distribution, with attenuated effect sizes for the FE model. Equivalized log income has a negative impact on subjective well-being throughout the distribution. Apart from a number of robustness checks, existing research is extended by looking into the quantile effects of the above variables on a set of domain satisfactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Subjective well-being
• quantile regressions
• heterogeneity
• BHPS
• life satisfaction

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I12
• I31

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for having been granted access to the BHPS data set, which was made available through the ESRC Data Archive. The data were originally collected by the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at the University of Essex (now incorporated within the Institute for Social and Economic Research). Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Archive bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ An additional model was estimated using Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters’ method (Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters 2004), leading to similar results, which are provided upon request.