The Impact of Victimisation on Subjective Well-Being

This paper uses the UK Household Longitudinal Study to explore the relationship between victimisation and several measures of subjective well-being. Using person fixed effects models, I find that being attacked or insulted both significantly reduce well-being at the mean, with no significant differences between men and women in the effect size. Next, using unconditional quantile regression with fixed effects models, I identify the highly heterogeneous effects of victimisation along the unconditional well-being distribution. The effect of victimisation on subjective wellbeing is monotonically decreasing, with those at ‘worse’ quantiles of the well-being distribution experiencing the largest falls in well-being, and those at the ‘better’ quantiles of the distribution experiencing the smallest falls.