Nattavudh Powdthavee

What Predicts a Successful Life? A Life-Course Model of Well-Being

Policy-makers who care about well-being need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a model using the British Cohort Study (1970). We show that the most powerful childhood predictor of adult life-satisfaction is the childs emotional health, followed by the childs conduct. The least powerful predictor is the childs intellectual development. This may have implications for educational policy. Among adult circumstances, family income accounts for only 0.5% of the variance of life-satisfaction. Mental and physical health are much more important.

Obesity, unhappiness, and The challenge of affluence: theory and evidence

Is affluence a good thing? The book The Challenge of Affluence by Avner Offer (2006) argues that economic prosperity weakens self�?control and undermines human well�?being. Consistent with a pessimistic view, we show that psychological distress has been rising through time in modern Great Britain. Taking over�?eating as an example, our data reveal that half the British population view themselves as overweight, and that happiness and mental health are worse among fatter people in Britain and Germany. Comparisons also matter. We discuss problems of inference and argue that longitudinal data are needed. We suggest a theory of obesity imitation where utility depends on relative weight.

Death, Happiness, and the Calculation of Compensatory Damages

This paper presents a study of the mental distress caused by bereavement. The greatest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse, the second greatest from the death of a child, and the third from the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be used in tort cases to calculate compensatory damages for emotional harm and pain and suffering. We examine alternative well‐being variables, discuss adaptation, consider the possibility that bereavement affects someone’s marginal utility of income, and suggest a procedure for correcting for the endogeneity of income. Although the paper’s contribution is methodological and further research is needed, some illustrative compensation amounts are discussed.

Destruction and Distress: Using a Quasi-Experiment to Show the Effects of the September 11 Attacks on Mental Well-Being in the United Kingdom*

Using a longitudinal household panel dataset in the UK, where a significant proportion of the interviews are conducted in September each year, we are able to show that the attacks of September 11 resulted in lower levels of subjective well-being for those interviewed after that date in 2001 compared with those interviewed before it. This quasi-experiment provides one of the first examples of the impact of a terrorist attack in one country on well-being in another country.

Putting different price tags on the same health condition: Re-evaluating the well-being valuation approach

Many recent writings in health policy have proposed that health be valued directly and in monetary terms using the new well-being valuation method. Yet there is no clear consensus on what the best measure of individuals experience may be for the evaluation process. To shed light on this issue, monetary values for a number of health problems are compared across different well-being measures within the same UK data set. We find that, whilst there is strong internal consistency of health impacts within each well-being measure, hugely different monetary valuations are obtained for the same health problem across different well-being measures. Our results, although should only viewed as illustrative, call for economists to rethink about which measure of well-being or experienced utility to be used in the well-being valuation method, should the approach ever be implemented in real policy contexts.

What happens to people before and after disability? Focusing effects, lead effects, and adaptation in different areas of life.

This paper addresses the question of when and to what extent different areas of a persons life are affected by mild and severe disability. We use a nationally representative longitudinal dataset of British individuals to examine what happens to seven different areas of life - health, income, housing, partner, social life, amount of leisure time, and use of leisure time - before and after disability. We found that although there is some evidence of lead effects to becoming disabled in more than one aspects of life, the strongest lead effects are found in the health domain. Disability has a negative impact on satisfactions with income, social life, and use of leisure time, but is positively associated with the levels of satisfaction with amount of leisure time. Adaptation takes place in almost all of the affected life domains for both disabled groups, but is often incomplete for the severely disabled. Finally, this paper proposes a two-layer model to study leads and lags in life satisfaction to different life events.

Does Education Reduce the Risk of Hypertension? Estimating the Biomarker Effect of Compulsory Schooling in England

This paper estimates the exogenous effect of schooling on reduced incidence of hypertension. Using the changes in the minimum school-leaving age law in the United Kingdom from age 14 to 15 in 1947 and from age 15 to 16 in 1973 as sources of exogenous variation in schooling, the regression discontinuity and instrumental variable probit estimates imply that, for the first law change in 1947, completing an extra year of schooling reduces the probability of developing subsequent hypertension by approximately 7–10 percentage points. No significant effect was found for the introduction of the second law change in 1973.

Anticipation, Free-Rider Problems, and Adaptation to Trade Unions: Re-examining the Curious Case of Dissatisfied Union Members

The author studies the past, contemporaneous, and future effects of union membership on job satisfaction. Using eleven waves (5–15) of the British Household Panel Survey, he documents evidence rejecting the paradox of dissatisfied union members. By separating union “free-riders” from union-covered non-members in fixed-effects equations, he finds significant anticipation effects to unionism for both prospective and covered non-members of both genders. Workers go on to report, on average, a significant net increase in their overall job satisfaction in the year unionization occurs, although this decreases with time. Moreover, adaptation to unionism is complete within the first few years of unionization. One explanation for this is that workers adapt their reported satisfaction over time to support their union bargaining efforts, which would be consistent with at least one explanation given for a unions role in fanning the flames of discontent with management during contract negotiations. That is, members may not actually be as dissatisfied with their jobs as it appears.

Longitudinal Evidence for a Midlife Nadir in Human Well-being: Results from Four Data Sets

There is a large amount of cross-sectional evidence for a midlife low in the life cycle of human happiness and well-being (a ‘U shape’). Yet no genuinely longitudinal inquiry has uncovered evidence for a U-shaped pattern. Thus, some researchers believe the U is a statistical artefact. We re-examine this fundamental cross-disciplinary question. We suggest a new test. Drawing on four data sets, and only within-person changes in well-being, we document powerful support for a U shape in longitudinal data (without the need for formal regression equations). The article’s methodological contribution is to use the first-derivative properties of a well-being equation.

What's the good of education on our overall quality of life? A simultaneous equation model of education and life satisfaction for Australia

Many economists and educators favour public support for education on the premise that education improves the overall quality of life of citizens. However, little is known about the different pathways through which education shapes peoples satisfaction with life overall. One reason for this is because previous studies have traditionally analysed the effect of education on life satisfaction using single-equation models that ignore interrelationships between different theoretical explanatory variables. In order to advance our understanding of how education may be related to overall quality of life, the current study estimates a structural equation model using nationally representative data for Australia to obtain the direct and indirect associations between education and life satisfaction through five different adult outcomes: income, employment, marriage, children, and health. Although we find the estimated direct (or net) effect of education on life satisfaction to be negative and statistically significant in Australia, the total indirect effect is positive, sizeable and statistically significant for both men and women. This implies that misleading conclusions regarding the influence of education on life satisfaction might be obtained if only single-equation models were used in the analysis.