We consider the link between poverty and subjective wellbeing and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 54,000 individuals living in Germany from 1985 to 2012 to show, first, that life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of contemporaneous poverty. We then reveal that there is little evidence of adaptation within a poverty spell: poverty starts bad and stays bad in terms of subjective well-being. We cannot identify any cause of poverty entry that explains the overall lack of poverty adaptation. ? 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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1 July 2016

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The Review of Economics and Statistics 98(3) , pp.591-600, 2016

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DOI: 10.1162/REST_a_00544

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01383894

This Journal article is published under the centre's Community Wellbeing programme.