| By: |
Alejandro Cid (Departamento de Economía, Universidad de Montevideo);
Daniel Ferrés (Departamento de Economía, Universidad de Montevideo);
Máximo Rossi (Departamento de Economía, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la República) |
| Abstract: |
A growing strand of economic literature focuses its attention on the
relationship between happiness levels and various individual and socioeconomic
variables. Recent studies analyze the impact of income, marital status,
health, educational levels and other socioeconomic variables on satisfaction
with life. A large majority of these studies limit their attention to
industrialized countries. In our work, we analyze data for a group of
individuals living in a Latin American country (Uruguay) with age 60 or older.
We use a rich data set that allows us to test different happiness hypothesis
employing four methodological approaches. We find that older people in Uruguay
have a tendency to report themselves happy when they are married, when they
have higher standards of health and when they earn higher levels of income or
they feel their income is suitable for their standard of living. On the
contrary, they report lower levels of happiness when they live alone and when
their nutrition is insufficient. We also find that education has no clear
impact on happiness. We think that our study is an initial contribution to the
study of those factors that can explain happiness among the elderly in Latin
American countries. Future work will focus on enhanced empirical analysis and
in extending our study to other countries. |
| Keywords: |
Happiness, Health, Family, Censored Econometric Models, Semiparametric Methods, Treatment Evaluation |
| JEL: |
C14 C24 I10 J12 |
| Date: |
2007–10 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ude:wpaper:1207&r=hap |