Subjective Financial Well-Being Across Life course: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis

Subjective financial well-being (SFWB), an essential component of a subjective well-being (SWB) concept, is of great importance for individuals, researchers and policymakers. This study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of financial well-being with a particular focus on the SFWB across lifecourse. We hypothesise that the SFWB changes in the course of life and its life-cycle pattern varies across countries with different level of economic development. We build our study upon the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) unique micro-level datasets providing state-of-the-art empirical evidence to explore the socio-cultural context of financial well-being in an international framework. We regress data from the second wave of GGS for Germany, France, Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia (a final sample of 52344 individuals). Our study supports the posed hypothesis and it reveals that the gap in the SFWB level between countries is smaller among young adults and its maximum is observed among elders. This is due to the diverging SFWB age profiles, with an increasing trend in the SFWB level across age in high income countries (Germany and France) and a decreasing trend in lower income countries (particularly in Bulgaria and Georgia).