Seminar in Public Economics - Increasing life expectancy and life satisfaction: Are longer lives worth it?
Time
Monday, 13. November 2017
17:00 - 18:30
Location
F425
Organizer
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik
Speaker:
Janina Nemitz (Universität Zürich)
"Increasing life expectancy and life satisfaction: Are longer lives worth it?"
Abstract:
Human longevity is rising rapidly across the industrialized world, but are longer lives more satis-
fied lives? The results of this study suggest that the answer is no. Despite living longer, people
did not become better off in terms of overall life satisfaction. When compared to 1985, in 2010
people were, on average, much less satisfi ed throughout their final period of life. Moreover, they
were expected to spend a larger proportion of their lives dissatis fied. Two important mechanisms, which explain these findings, are health and social isolation. The empirical approach,
which gives rise to these results, is twofold. First, I analyze time trends of average life satisfaction and background characteristics for West German elderly who are within five years of death.
Second, I estimate satis fied and dissatisfi ed life expectancies at age 60 at di fferent points in time to test whether the increase in lifetime compensated for the deterioration of the fi nal period of life. Several sensitivity checks indicate that compositional changes in the population over time, cohort e ffects, time-in-panel e ffects, and a simple aging-unrelated time trend in life satisfaction are unlikely to explain the above results.