Abstract

Do we enjoy life more as we age? The studies that have attempted to determine the value of enjoyment of life assume that such value decreases with age simply because a younger person has a longer life expectancy. In other words, they all assume that quantity is better quality. My hypothesis is that a young person may have longer to live but his older counterpart has more to live for. ;This dissertation tests the above hypothesis empirically. This is achieved by directly comparing peoples' choices of jobs in different age groups. Different jobs have different attributes. Wage is a function of those job attributes. If there are unpleasant attributes, then the employer has to offer a higher wage. One such unpleasant attribute is the risk of injury on the job. Riskier jobs, therefore, have to offer a wage premium. ;If we equate injury to going up the enjoyment of life, through examining the amount of a wage premium one is willing to take in order to accept additional risks on the job, we can analyze how much a person values the enjoyment of life. We can, then, compare the wage-risk tradeoff for different age groups in order to see how much wage premium they require to risk giving up the enjoyment of life. ;This study shows that as men get older, they demand a higher wage for the same level of risk on the job relative to their younger counterparts. In fact, men in their early sixties exhibit a wage-risk tradeoff twenty times larger than their twenty year old counterparts