Parents Transmit Happiness Along with Associated Values and Behaviors to their Children - A Lifelong Happiness Dividend?

There are strong two-way links between parent and child happiness (life satisfaction), even for 'children' who have grown up, moved to their own home and partnered themselves. German panel evidence shows that transmission of (un)happiness from parents to children is partly due to transmission of values and behaviors known to be associated with happiness (Headey, Wagner and Muffels, 2010, 2012). These values and behaviors include giving priority to pro-social and family values, rather than material values, maintaining a preferred balance between work and leisure, active social and community participation, and regular exercise. Both parents have about equal influence on the values and behaviors which children adopt. However, the life satisfaction of adult 'children' continues to be directly influenced by the life satisfaction of their mothers, with the influence of fathers being only indirect, via transmission of values and behaviors. There appears to be a lifelong happiness dividend (or unhappiness dividend) due to parenting. Structural equation models with two-way causation indicate that the life satisfaction of offspring can significantly affect the satisfaction of their parents, as well as vice-versa, long after the 'children' have left home. Data come from 25 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP, 1984-2008). SOEP is the only panel survey worldwide in which data on life satisfaction have been obtained from parents and an adequate sub-sample of children no longer living in the parental home

Capabilities and Choices: Do They Make Sen'Se for Understanding Objective and Subjective Well-Being?: An Empirical Test of Sen's Capability Framework on German and British Panel Data

In Sen's Capability Approach (CA) well-being can be defined as the freedom of choice to achieve the things in life which one has reason to value most for his or her personal life. Capabilities are in Sen's vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people have or the opportunities available to them. In this paper we examine the impact of capabilities alongside choices on subjective and objective well-being. There is a lot of theoretical work on Sen's capability framework but still a lack of empirical research in measuring and testing his capability model especially in a dynamic perspective. The aim of the paper is to elaborate and test a "stock-flow" model measuring capabilities and choices to explain longer-term changes in well-being using 25 years of German and 18 years of British data. Three measures of well-being are constructed: life satisfaction for subjective well-being (SWB) and relative income and employment security for objective well-being (OWB). We ran random and fixed effects GLS models. The findings strongly support Sen's capabilities framework and provide new evidence on the way capabilities and choices matter for well-being. Capabilities indicated by human capital, trust, altruism and risk taking, and family, work-leisure, lifestyle and social choices show to strongly affect the three well-being indicators but their effect sizes differ largely dependent on the type of indicator used

Choices Which Change Life Satisfaction: Similar Results for Australia, Britain and Germany

Using data from national socio-economic panel surveys in Australia, Britain and Germany, this paper analyzes the effects of individual preferences and choices on subjective well-being (SWB). It is shown that, in all three countries, preferences and choices relating to life goals/values, partner's personality, hours of work, social participation and healthy lifestyle have substantial and similar effects on life satisfaction. The results have negative implications for a widely accepted theory of SWB, set-point theory. This theory holds that adult SWB is stable in the medium and long term, although temporary fluctuations occur due to life events. Set-point theory has come under increasing criticism in recent years, primarily due to unmistakable evidence in the German Socio-Economic Panel that, during the last 25 years, over a third of the population has recorded substantial and apparently permanent changes in life satisfaction (Fujita and Diener, 2005; Headey, 2008a; Headey, Muffels and Wagner, 2010). It is becoming clear that the main challenge now for SWB researchers is to develop new explanations which can account for medium and long term change, and not merely stability in SWB. Set-point theory is limited precisely because it is purely a theory of stability. The paper is based on specially constructed panel survey files in which data are divided into multi-year periods in order to facilitate analysis of medium and long term change

Living Standards in Retirement: Accepted International Comparisons are Misleading

Accepted international assessments of living standards in retirement rely on comparing social pension incomes. These assessments conclude that European countries with contributory pension schemes provide retirees with higher living standards than liberal Anglo-American regimes in which many citizens rely on flat rate old age pensions. Comparisons based solely on pension incomes are potentially misleading because the living standards of retirees depend on their total economic resources, particularly their wealth. In this paper we make use of the wealth data in the German (SOEP) and Australian (HILDA) panels. Our revised ’present value" estimates of wealth suggest that Australian and German retirees have approximately the same living standards (mean and median), with much the same distribution (Gini)

Welfare capitalism: The ten year impact of governments on poverty, inequality and financial risk in West Germany, the Netherlands and the USA

This paper assesses the ten year (1987-96) impact of taxes and transfers on poverty, income inequality and financial insecurity in the working age populations of the Netherlands, the USA and West Germany. These are the only countries for which ten consecutive years of socio-economic panel survey data are available, so they afford a unique opportunity to assess the medium to long term performance of governments in achieving key equity goals. It is indeed fortunate that Germany, the Netherlands and the USA are the three countries for which long running panels exist, because they can be taken as ‘best cases’ of Gosta Esping-Andersen’s ‘Three worlds of welfare capitalism’ (1990). In Esping-Andersen’s terms the USA is the prototypical liberal capitalist system and Germany is the clearest case of a conservative, corporatist welfare - capitalist state. The Netherlands from the mid-1980s onwards is classified by Esping-Andersen as a social democratic welfare-capitalist state, although it is clearly a borderline judgment, since the Netherlands has progressive social benefits but does not have the other defining characteristic of social democracy (according to Esping-Andersen’s slightly Swedocentric view) of commitment to active labor market programs