Increasing longevity and life satisfaction: Is there a catch to living longer? New paper published ONLINE FIRST OPEN ACCESS in the Journal of Population Economics by Janina Nemitz.

A new paper published ONLINE FIRST with free OPEN ACCESS shows that the life satisfaction of elderly people in West Germany declined; they are experiencing their remaining lifetime in states of dissatisfaction.

The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.

Increasing longevity and life satisfaction: Is there a catch to living longer?

by Janina Nemitz

Published ONLINE FIRST 2021: Journal of Population Economics
OPEN ACCESS

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 002-Cover-Page-JPopEa.jpg

Author Abstract: Human longevity is rising rapidly all over the world, but are longer lives more satisfied lives? This study suggests that the answer might be no. Despite a substantial increase in months of satisfying life, people’s overall life satisfaction declined between 1985 and 2011 in West Germany due to substantial losses of life satisfaction in old age. When compared to 1985, in 2011, elderly West Germans were, on average, much less satisfied throughout their last five years of life. Moreover, they spent a larger proportion of their remaining lifetime in states of dissatisfaction, on average. Two important mechanisms that contributed to this satisfaction decline were health and social isolation. Using a broad variety of sensitivity tests, I show that these results are robust to a large set of alternative explanations.

Number of submissions, 2010-2020
EiC Report 2020


Journal of Population Economics
Access to the recently published Volume 34, Issue 2, April 2021.
Workshop presentation of key articles with full video.

LEAD ARTICLE OF ISSUE 2, 2021:
Measuring gender attitudes using list experiments
by M. Niaz Asadullah, Elisabetta De Cao, Fathema Zhura Khatoon, and Zahra Siddique
OPEN ACCESS: Free ReadlinkDownload PDF

Ends;