Son of My Father? The Life‐Cycle Analysis of Well‐Being: Introduction
本文是《经济杂志》特刊的引言，介绍两篇使用队列数据研究成年人主观幸福感生命周期的文章，并回顾了经济学中幸福感文献的快速增长。
This Feature consists of two articles on the life‐cycle analysis of adult subjective well‐being using cohort data. That this should be the subject of a Feature in the Economic Journal would have astonished the somewhat‐younger me who started working on subjective well‐being data in the early 1990s.1 Yet in the meantime, the literature on subjective well‐being in Economics has grown enormously. One witness to this growth is the Economic Journal itself, in which three of the four top‐cited articles published since those early 1990s have the word ‘happiness’ in their title.2 Part of the growth in empirical work on subjective well‐being can be explained by the relatively recent availability of data on subjective evaluations or mental states (although empiricists may wonder whether it was instead growing demand that brought about increased supply). The by‐now fairly standard life satisfaction question did not appear in the BHPS until Wave 6 in 1996 and the four subjective well‐being questions in the UK Integrated Household Survey appeared for the first time in April 2011. Across the water, a well‐being module is being introduced in the 2013 and 2015 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which began in 1968.