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"I'm afraid I have bad news for you..." Estimating the impact of different health impairments on subjective well-being

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 14:39 authored by Martin Binder, Alex Coad
Bad health decreases individuals' happiness, but few studies measure the impact of specific illnesses. We apply matching estimators to examine how changes in different (objective) conditions of bad health affect subjective well-being for a sample of 100,265 observations from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) database (1996-2006). The strongest effect is for alcohol and drug abuse, followed by anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses, stroke and cancer. Adaptation to health impairments varies across health impairments. There is also a puzzling asymmetry: strong adverse reactions to deteriorations in health appear alongside weak increases in well-being after health improvements. In conclusion, our analysis offers a more detailed account of how bad health influences happiness than accounts focusing on how bad self-assessed health affects individual well-being.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Social Science & Medicine

ISSN

0277-9536

Publisher

Elsevier

Issue

1

Volume

87

Page range

155-167

Department affiliated with

  • SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2013-04-03

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