The Role of Visible Wealth for Deprivation

Veronika Bertram-Hümmer () and Ghassan Baliki

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2015, vol. 124, issue 3, 765-783

Abstract: Motivated by the lack of literature linking actual to perceived relative deprivation, this paper assesses the role of visibility in goods and assets vis-à-vis income behind perceptions of relative deprivation. We rely on household survey data that include unique information on reported perceived deprivation with a pre-specified reference group, namely others in the same town or village. Based on a large number of asset and consumption items, we create an index of visible wealth by aggregating visible goods and assets using principal component weights. We show that relative deprivation in visible wealth has a significantly stronger effect than income in determining levels of perceived relative deprivation. The finding is robust under various sensitivity checks and for a number of controls. Our result sheds light on the importance of the visibility of the objects of comparison on an individual’s assessment of the own relative economic situation and proposes that future research should not only rely on income-based deprivation measures. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Relative deprivation; Visible wealth; Income; Comparison group; C23; C25; D31; I31; P3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-014-0824-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Role of Visible Wealth for Deprivation (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:124:y:2015:i:3:p:765-783

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-014-0824-2

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().