TY - JOUR
T1 - "I'm afraid I have bad news for you. . ." Estimating the impact of different health impairments on subjective well-being
AU - Binder, Martin
AU - Coad, Alex
PY - 2013/6
Y1 - 2013/6
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - BHPS
KW - Great Britain
KW - Happiness
KW - Health
KW - Illness
KW - Matching estimators
KW - Propensity score matching
KW - Subjective well-being
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84877072314&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84877072314&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.03.025
DO - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.03.025
M3 - Article
C2 - 23631791
AN - SCOPUS:84877072314
SN - 0277-9536
VL - 87
SP - 155
EP - 167
JO - Ethics in Science and Medicine
JF - Ethics in Science and Medicine
ER -