American Life Histories
NBER Working Paper No. w33373
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Abstract
What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,300 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures, sources of meaning, and overall life satisfaction.
David Lagakos, Stelios Michalopoulos, Hans-Joachim Voth (2025-01). “American Life Histories.” NBER Working Paper No. w33373.