Chronic pain clearly lowers utility, but valuing the reduction in utility is empirically challenging. Here, we use improvements over prior applications of the subjective well-being method to estimate the implied trade-off between pain and income using four waves of the Health and Retirement Study (2008-2014), a nationally representative survey on individuals age 50 and older. We model income with a flexible functional form, allowing the trade-off between pain and income to vary across income groups. We control for individual fixed effects in the life-satisfaction equations and instrument for income in some models. We find values for avoiding pain ranging between 56-145 USD per day. These results are lower than previously reported and suggest that the higher previous estimates may be heavily affected by the highest income level and confounded by endogeneity in the income variable. As expected, we find that the value of pain relief increases with pain severity.

中文翻译：

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使用主观幸福感评估疼痛。

慢性疼痛显然会降低效用，但是评估效用的降低在经验上具有挑战性。在这里，我们使用对主观幸福感方法先前应用的改进，通过四次健康与退休研究（2008-2014年）（一项针对50岁和50岁以上人群的全国代表性调查）估算疼痛与收入之间的隐含权衡。年长一些。我们使用灵活的功能形式对收入进行建模，从而使痛苦和收入之间的权衡在不同收入组之间有所不同。在某些模型中，我们控制生活满意度方程式中的个体固定效应和收入工具。我们发现避免疼痛的价值每天在56-145美元之间。这些结果低于以前的报告，表明较高的先前估计值可能会受到最高收入水平的严重影响，并因收入变量的内生性而混淆。正如预期的那样，我们发现，缓解疼痛的价值随着疼痛的严重程度而增加。