Adaptation to Income over Time: A Weak Point of Subjective Well-Being

Christoph Wunder

Schmollers Jahrbuch : Journal of Applied Social Science Studies / Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, 2009, vol. 129, issue 2, 269-281

Abstract: This article holds the view that intertemporal comparisons of subjective well-being measures are only meaningful when the underlying standards of judgment are unaltered. This is a weak point of such measures. The study investigates the change in the satisfaction judgments resulting from adaptation to income over time. Adaptation is defined to be desensitization (sensitization) to the hedonic effect of income resulting from an upward (downward) adjustment of the standards. A framework is introduced that provides empirical estimates for the rate of adaptation using data from the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP).

JEL-codes: C23 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/schm.129.2.269 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers (2008 onwards); Pay-per-view access from http://www.genios.de (2000 onwards with 2 years moving wall) and http://ejournals.duncker-humblot.de/loi/schm (2008 onwards)

Related works:
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:aeq:aeqsjb:v129_y2009_i1_q1_p269-281

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.duncker-h ... llersjahrbuch-1.html

Access Statistics for this article

Schmollers Jahrbuch : Journal of Applied Social Science Studies / Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften is currently edited by Gert G. Wagner and Joachim Wagner

More articles in Schmollers Jahrbuch : Journal of Applied Social Science Studies / Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften from Duncker & Humblot, Berlin
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriele Freudenmann ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).