Human Well-Being over the Life Cycle : Longitudinal Evidence from a 20-Year Panel

This paper uses longitudinal data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) to analyze the course of subjective well-being over the life cycle. The paper ends that the U-shaped pattern of life satisfaction over age is less supported in a longitudinal analysis. Moreover, assets and material well-being seem to play an important role in determining the course of satisfaction over life time. The upsurge of happiness after mid-life seems to be more robust to model specifications, which might imply that the latter is inherent to mankind