 Do reference values matter? Some notes and extensions on "income and happiness across Europe"Andreas Drichoutis, Rodolfo Nayga and Panagiotis Lazaridis () Journal of Economic Psychology, 2010, vol. 31, issue 4, 479-486 Abstract: We add to the analysis conducted in an article in this journal authored by Caporale, Georgellis, Tsitsianis, and Yin (2009) (hereafter CGTY) which assessed the relationship between subjective well-being, income and relative income in Europe. Specifically, we note some data management, model/variable specification, and econometric issues that can affect the validity of the findings of CGTY. We then present our own augmented model to test the robustness of the results from the CGTY study. When we try to replicate CGTY's estimation, we find that the main variable of interest, i.e. the reference income variable, reverts sign. We also find several differences in our results, the most important of which is that, in contrast to CGTY's result that suggests a statistically significant negative reference income effect on life satisfaction, reference income does not really significantly affect life satisfaction in our estimations. Keywords: Comparison; income; Reference; groups; Happiness; Life; satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:31:y:2010:i:4:p:479-486 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
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