Happiness and Age Cycles - Return to Start...?

Previous happiness research has explicitly assumed that subjective well-being is U-shaped in age.This paper sheds new light on this issue testing several functional forms. Using micro data from the WorldValues Survey on 44 000 persons in 30 economically advanced OECD countries with long lifeexpectancies, we reveal a hyperbolic functional form. We find that life satisfaction reaches another localmaximum around the age of 83, with a level identical to that of a 26-year old. This hyperbolic well-beingagerelation is robust to the inclusion of cohort effects. We test this relationship for each OECD countryseparately, and corroborate the functional form using a sample of non-OECD countries.