Sliding down the U-shape? An investigation of the age-well-being relationship, with a focus on young adults.

Much of the work within economics attempting to understand the relationship between age and well-being has focused on the U-shape, whether it exists and, more recently, potential reasons for its existence. This paper focuses on one part of the lifecycle rather than the whole: young people. This offers a better understanding of the age-well-being relationship for young people, and helps with increasing general understanding regarding the U-shape itself. The empirical estimations employ both static and dynamic panel estimations, with the latter providing an illustration of the importance of decisions concerning the endogeneity or exogeneity of the regressors. The empirical results are in line with the U-shape, and the results from the dynamic analysis both lend support to reasons put forward for the changing nature of the age-well-being relationship over the whole lifecycle and also suggest a further avenue for research.