Relative Pay, Rank and Happiness: A Comparison Between Genders and Part- and Full-Time Employees

Matthias Collischon

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2019, vol. 20, issue 1, No 5, 67-80

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigates the effects of comparison pay on job and life satisfaction with longitudinal survey data from Germany. I use linear fixed effects models to account for unobserved heterogeneity and define the reference groups as individuals within the same occupation and industry. Men and women are expected to behave differently to comparison pay and are therefore investigated separately. Additionally, I investigate full- and part-time employees separately because the effect of relative positions in the reference group should affect life satisfaction for full-time employees only. The findings indicate that both relative pay and the individual rank within the respective reference group affect job and life satisfaction for full-time employed males only, while part-time employed females gain job satisfaction with increasing rank within their reference group. Part-time employees experience no change in their life satisfaction due to changes in either inequality dimension.

Keywords: Comparison pay; Rank-income hypothesis; Reference-wage hypothesis; Life satisfaction; Happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10902-017-9937-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jhappi:v:20:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10902-017-9937-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... fe/journal/10902/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10902-017-9937-z

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Happiness Studies is currently edited by Antonella Delle Fave

More articles in Journal of Happiness Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().