Analysis of age-related happiness shows a declining trajectory, suggesting underlying biases in assumptions.
A large interdisciplinary literature on the relationship between age and subjective well-being (happiness) has produced very mixed evidence. In this paper we argue that this is due to potential sources of bias that may distort the assessment of the age-happiness relationship. Most biases tend to produce a spuriously U-shaped age trajectory. In contrast, applying our suggested specification to German panel data we find a (nearly monotonic) declining age happiness trajectory.
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Kratz et al. (2025) studied this question.
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