 When money does not buy happiness: The case of "frustrated achievers"Leonardo Becchetti and Fiammetta Rossetti Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2009, vol. 38, issue 1, 159-167 Abstract: An increase in real per capita income is generally expected to be associated with nonnegative variations in life satisfaction. The alternative (association with negative changes) is generally defined as "frustrated achievement" [Graham, C., Pettinato, S., 2002. Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and Insecurity in New Market Economies. The Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C.]. We investigate the determinants of "frustrated achievement" in the German socioeconomic panel on more than 30,000 individuals collected between 1992 and 2004. We observe a parallel reduction in self-declared life satisfaction corresponding to almost one-third of yearly increases in (equalised) real household income. Our econometric findings show that the lack of a full-time job, health deterioration, relative income effects, marital status shocks and poorer social life are the main factors associated with this phenomenon. Keywords: Life; satisfaction; Relative; income; Frustrated; achievement (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:soceco:v:38:y:2009:i:1:p:159-167 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier |
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