Did the COVID-19 pandemic change the importance of health for life satisfaction? Evidence from France.

Abstract

COVID-19 has brought health protection to the top of the political agenda in many countries, at the cost of reduced freedoms, social relationships, and economic opportunities. This context may have led individuals to pay more attention to their health and to attach greater importance to it in life satisfaction. This paper examines the possibility of an increase in the correlation between life and health satisfaction after the onset of the pandemic using repeated cross-sectional data in France between 2016 and 2021 and an original jittering strategy to smooth the ordinal variables of life and health satisfaction in regression models of subjective well-being. The estimates show an increased correlation between health and life satisfaction for women aged 50 and over, but no change for men. However, the increase in correlation observed for older women disappears by the second half of 2021. These results are robust to several sensitivity analyses and lead to the conclusion that the COVID-19 pandemic did not significantly and permanently change the importance of personal health for life satisfaction.