Happiness and health

In this work, our principal aim has been to provide an accurate estimate of the effect of health on SWB by using the Swiss Household Panel dataset and panel data models that enable us to control for unobserved heterogeneity. The latter represents the main obstacle in models which attempt to estimate causal effects (Cameron and Trivedi, 2009). As a second objective, we focused on the study of the temporal dynamics underlying the emergence of happiness and on the relationship between happiness and health. We were interested in clarifying: (a) whether people were able to fully adjust to past health circumstances as well as to past life events; and (b) whether SWB was autoregressive. In other terms, we investigated the existence of habituation in SWB.