The role of subjective indicators of wellbeing in predicting health outcomes

The thesis investigates then nexus between subjective indicators of wellbeing (such as perceived health status and perceived level of life meaning) and different types of health outcomes. First, we test whether lagged self assessed health (SAH) is correlated with future changes in the number of chronic diseases, net of the concurring correlations with levels and changes in socio-demographic factors and health styles, country and regional health system effects and declared symptoms. We find that low levels of SAH are significantly and negatively correlated with insurgence of chronic diseases (even after controlling for attrition bias). Our findings are robust in age, gender, education and income class splits. Illness specific estimates show that lagged SAH significantly correlates with arthritis, cholesterol and lung diseases (and weakly so with ulcer, hypertension and cataracts), while having a significant correlation with the probability of contracting cancer. The second focus of the thesis is the concept of eudaimonic wellbeing measured by the indicator “meaning in life”. Eudaimonic wellbeing is a relatively unexplored subjective wellbeing indicator, started to be studied only recently. The empirical findings in this case show that having low levels of life meaning has a significant and quantitatively remarkable correlation with the future insurgence of some chronic diseases and the reduction of most functionalities in the ageing population. Moreover, we find that the impact of eudaimonic subjective wellbeing is independent from that of the traditional life satisfaction measure (cognitive subjective wellbeing). Thirdly, we investigate the nexus between life menaing and mortality. We find that the absence of life meaning increases the risk of mortality net of the impact of socio-demographic factors, life styles, symptoms and even life satisfaction and self assessed health controls. We as well document for the first time in this literature that the correlation is gender specific (it works more for females), stronger for the less educated and partially explained by behavioural factors such as deterioration of life styles and body activity.