What Predicts a Happy Life? A Brief Introduction to the Special Issue on the Well-being over the Life Course

The literature on the economics of well-being has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last four decades (Clark, 2018), with JEBO often playing the central role in the expansion of our understanding of what makes people happy (e.g., Easterlin, 1995; McBride, 2001; Stutzer, 2004). The field has progressed from scholars conducting simple cross-sectional and panel data analysis, which uncovers the relationship between current characteristics and well-being, to working with longitudinal and cohort data to show how past events influence future well-being (Frijters et al., 2014; Layard et al., 2014). As government agencies start to pay more attention to where in the life-cycle they should intervene to maximize their citizen's well-being, studies that use longitudinal or cohort data to estimate how much childhood matters to adulthood well-being are now becoming more relevant and important to guiding policymakers in their decision-making process. This calls for more analysis based on longitudinal and cohort data from different countries around the world. The following collection of five papers comprise a JEBO special issue on the well-being over the life-course reflects recent developments in this much needed research area.Peer reviewe