Health Perception Impact on Happiness

Abstract

The paper attempts to identify the relationship between health perception and happiness in gender relative perspective. Even there are large volumes of research, devoted to analyze gender happiness disparity, most of them neglected health perception aspect. Moreover, although it sounds quite obvious that happiness and health perception are correlated, its rather unclear whether happiness disparity can be explained by health perception disparity. The results, based on World Value Survey panel data and IV regression, verifies that health perception gender disparity has strong impact on gender happiness disparity, which implies relatively better health perception can improve corresponding genders relative happiness. It also can be interpreted as balanced health perception between gender will lessen gender happiness disparity. This paper analyzed happiness gender disparity in economic framework and shed light on the power of health perception on happiness in distinctive way.