  A recent contribution to research on age and well-being (Blanchflower 2021)
found that the impact of age on happiness is "u-shaped" virtually everywhere:
happiness declines towards middle age and subsequently rises, in almost all
countries. This paper evaluates that finding for European countries,
considering whether it is robust to alternative methodological approaches. The
analysis here excludes control variables that are affected by age (noting that
those variable are not themselves antecedents of age) and uses data from the
entire adult age range (rather than using data only from respondents younger
than 70). I also explore the relationship via models that do not impose a
quadratic functional form. The paper shows that these alternate approaches do
not lead us to perceive a u-shape "everywhere": u-shapes are evident for some
countries, but for others the pattern is quite different.
