Economic Satisfaction and Income Rank in Small Neighbourhoods

Andrew Clark, Nicolai Kristensen and Niels Westergård-Nielsen ()

Journal of the European Economic Association, 2009, vol. 7, issue 2-3, 519-527

Abstract: We contribute to the literature on well-being and comparisons by appealing to new Danish data dividing the country up into around 9,000 small neighbourhoods. Administrative data provides us with the income of every person in each of these neighbourhoods. This income information is matched to demographic and economic satisfaction variables from eight years of Danish ECHP data. Panel regression analysis shows that, conditional on own household income, respondents report higher satisfaction levels when their neighbours are richer. However, individuals are rank-sensitive: Conditional on one's own income and neighbourhood median income, respondents are more satisfied as their percentile neighbourhood ranking improves. A ten percentage point rise in rank (i.e., from 40th to 20th position in a 200-household cell) is worth 0.11 on a 1-6 scale, which is a large marginal effect in satisfaction terms. (JEL: C23, C25, D84, J28, J31) (c) 2009 by the European Economic Association.

JEL-codes: C23 C25 D84 J28 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (139)

Downloads: (external link)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1542-4774/issues link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Economic satisfaction and income rank in small neighbourhoods (2009)
Working Paper: Economic satisfaction and income rank in small neighbourhoods (2009)
Working Paper: Economic satisfaction and income rank in small neighbourhoods (2008)
Working Paper: Economic satisfaction and income rank in small neighbourhoods (2008)
Working Paper: Economic Satisfaction and Income Rank in Small Neighbourhoods (2008)
Working Paper: Economic Satisfaction and Income Rank in Small Neighbourhoods (2008)
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:tpr:jeurec:v:7:y:2009:i:2-3:p:519-527

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Xavier Vives, George-Marios Angeletos, Orazio P. Attanasio, Fabio Canova and Roberto Perotti

More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().