Socio-Economic Determinants of Life Satisfaction : The Case of Iranian Professors in Tehran's State-Owned Universities

This paper purports to examine the determinants of subjective well-being (life satisfaction) of retired professors in Tehran’s selected universities. In this respect, a questionnaire-based study was done among 350 retired academicians in the public Universities of Tehran. Data were collected using Diener et al.’s Life satisfaction scale. Moreover, we use an ordered logit model to take the ordinal nature of the Life satisfaction scale into account. Diener’s proxy shows a relatively high level of Life satisfaction among retired professors. The estimated results show a negative and significant effect of age, retirement age, and retirement duration on Life satisfaction. On the other hand, marital status and university rank were positively related to the life satisfaction of academicians. Also, we found that pension benefit has an important positive effect on determining life satisfaction. In addition, the results indicate that the ones who were forced to retire, have a lower level of life satisfaction than those who had an arbitrary retirement. Finally, we found that post-retirement professional activities also contributed to life satisfaction