region.<sup>3</sup> This region warrants investigation not only because of the diverse cultures it encompasses but also because of the significant institutional and economic transformations many of its countries have undergone in the past few decades. Whereas the region’s cultural diversity permits us to test the universality of the U-shape hypothesis across different country contexts, the transformations experienced by most of these countries in the 1990s enable us to capture variations across cohorts whose economic and social environments differed radically at different points in the lifecycle. The finding of a U-shape across a diverse set of ECA countries and across cohorts within these countries would thus support the view that this U- shaped relation is fairly universal and resilient to contextual changes.

With few exceptions (Blanchflower and Oswald, 2008; Deaton, 2008; Steptoe _et al._ , 2015), studies of subjective well-being in the ECA region have not focused on an in-depth analysis of the interdependence between this variable and age. Rather, well-being regressions in most studies use age only as a potential covariate that is controlled when examining the association between well-being and such aspects as income (Frijters _et al._ , 2006), the transition process (Hayo, 2007), and/or the correlations among different subjective welfare measures (Cojocaru and Diagne 2015). In contrast to Deaton (2008) and Steptoe _et al._ (2015), these ECA studies consistently find a U-shaped pattern across the region, although they differ in both the way that well-being is defined<sup>4</sup> and the precise shape and location of the minimum. Country-specific evidence from the WVS also supports the U-shape for most countries in the ECA region (Namazie and Sanfey, 2001; Blanchflower and Oswald, 2008).<sup>5</sup> For the Russian Federation, cross-sectional analyses using the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) also find life satisfaction to be U-shaped in age, with a minimum in well-being between 45 and 55 (Graham and Pettianto, 2002; Ravallion and Lokshin, 2002; Graham _et al._ , 2004). However, by exploiting the panel aspect of the RLMS (data from 1994 to 2010) and accounting for individual fixed effects, Massin and Kopp (2014) estimate a nonlinear specification of age that places the lowest levels of well-being at age 30–39. They also find that the level of well-being for the oldest age group (70 and above) is statistically similar to that for people aged 20 years and younger.

Our contribution to the research is twofold: first, by performing a systematic assessment of the relation between subjective well-being and age across the entire ECA region, we greatly

> 3 The ECA region is defined by the World Bank as covering 30 countries, ranging from Kazakhstan in the east to Poland in the west. The complete list of countries can be found at: <u>http://www.worldbank.org/en/region/eca/brief/country-program-snapshots.</u>

> 4 Minima vary from 37 (Hayo and Seifert, 2003) to 44 (Hayo, 2007) to 46.5 (48.2) for men (women) (Blanchflower and Oswald, 2008).

> 5 Specifically, the U-shaped relation is found for Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, FYR Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey and Russian Federation.

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