Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction in Korea: When Gender Matters

Abstract

Using detailed longitudinal data from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) from 1998 to 2008, this paper finds significant gender differences in impacts as well as adaptation patterns to major life and labor market events in Korea. Men remain on a higher happiness level throughout marriage, while women return to their baseline happiness within only two years. Consequently, men suffer more from divorce and the death of a spouse. This marital gender happiness gap is equivalent to a (husband only) increase of annual per capita household income of approximately US$17,800. The study further finds that men suffer more from unemployment. Results are robust to the inclusion of multiple simultaneous events and the use of different estimators.

Gender differences in the effect of social support on health-related quality of life: results of a population-based prospective cohort study in old age in Germany

“…Yet, on the other side, women's high social ties over the course of life might lead to a faster compensation for the loss of social support in old age. Consequently, we assume that the effect of social support on HRQoL in women might be of short-term nature and, therefore, covered due to adaptation processes in our sample since women tend to adapt faster than men to major life events [61][62][63]. Furthermore, HRQoL is negatively affected by increasing age and the occurrence of subjective memory problems.…”

Adaptation and the Easterlin Paradox

“…An interesting mirror to most of the work in this area, which has dealt with health problems of 13 Rudolf and Kang (2015) note that much of the childbirth effect found in the literature might actually reflect an overlapping effect from marriage. The joint modeling of multiple adaptation to different events seems potentially rather complicated.…”

“…Marriage leads to lasting life satisfaction gains in Russia (Clark and Uglanova, 2012), and Rudolf and Kang (2015) also find that marriage is lastingly good in Korea (but only for men). It is also striking that in these two countries we do not observe much of a happiness spike at the year of marriage, which we do see in the other panel datasets under consideration.…”

“…Even here, most analyses suggest that this sharp fall in well-being is not permanent, with full adaptation in British, Russian and German panel data and for Korean men, and partial adaptation in Switzerland. The outliers here are Frijters et al (2011), who find no adaptation to the death of a spouse or child in Australian data (although they do not analyse widowhood as an isolated event), and the Korean women in Rudolf and Kang (2015).…”

Income versus Consumption Inequality in Korea: Evaluating Stochastic Dominance Rankings by Various Household Attributes

“…This procedure provides measures of permanent income and expenditure purged of transitory shocks. Korean households can be expected to be able to smooth transitory shocks relatively easily with the help of financial markets as well as public and private transfers (Rudolf and Kang, ). In line with the permanent income hypothesis, relative poverty and inequality in an environment with partial insurance will be determined primarily by a person's permanent income, which depends on the sum of discounted expected life time earnings (Friedman, ; Deaton, ).…”