American Life Histories
Working paper · NBER Working Paper 33373 · April 2025
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.
Lagakos, D., Michalopoulos, S., & Voth, H.-J. (2025). “American Life Histories.” NBER Working Paper 33373.