There is a mid-life low in well-being in Germany

Abstract

Kassenboehmer and Haisken-DeNew (2012) claim that there is no well-being midlife low in Germany, when controlling for fixed effects, respondent experience and interviewer characteristics in the German Socio-Economic Panel, 1994-2006. We re-estimate with a longer run of years using their methods and find that well-being declines to a low in midlife and is neither flat nor trivial.