SOCIAL COMPARISON AND SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING: DOES THE HEALTH OF OTHERS MATTER?

Vincenzo Carrieri

No 201014, Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF

Abstract: The importance of social comparison in shaping individual utility has been widely documented by subjective well-being literature. So far, income has been the main dimension considered in social comparison. This paper aims to investigate whether subjective well-being is influenced by inter-personal comparison with respect to health. Thus, we study the effects of the health of others and relative health hypothesis on two measures of subjective well-being: happiness and subjective health. Using data from the Italian Health Conditions survey, we show that a high incidence of chronic conditions and disability among reference groups negatively affects both happiness and subjective health. Such effects are stronger among people in the same conditions. These results, robust to different econometric specifications and estimation techniques, suggest the presence of some sympathy in individual preferences with respect to health and reveal that other people?s health status serves as a benchmark to assess one?s own health conditions.

Keywords: health conditions; social comparison; subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 D64 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2010-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-hea and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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http://www.ecostat.unical.it/RePEc/WorkingPapers/WP14_2010.pdf First version, 2010-07 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: SOCIAL COMPARISON AND SUBJECTIVE WELL‐BEING: DOES THE HEALTH OF OTHERS MATTER? (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:clb:wpaper:201014

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