Education and happiness: an alternative hypothesis

ABSTRACT

Recent research has documented a negative relationship between education and happiness. We test the hypothesis that the extent to which education makes an individual happy depends on their current age in life. We find suggestive evidence that people with higher education are more likely to be happier, on average, than their less educated counterparts starting in their early to mid-30s.

KEYWORDS:

• Subjective well-being
• returns to education

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I31
• I2

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The data used in this paper was extracted using the Add-On package PanelWhiz for Stata®. PanelWhiz (http://www.PanelWhiz.eu) was written by Dr. John P. Haisken-DeNew ([email protected]). See Hahn and Haisken-DeNew (2013) and Haisken-DeNew and Hahn (2010) for details. The PanelWhiz generated DO file to retrieve the data used here is available from me upon request. Any data or computational errors in this paper are my own.