Subjective Well-Being and Relative Deprivation: An Empirical Link

Conchita D'Ambrosio and Joachim Frick

No 449, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between two well-established con-cepts of measuring individual well-being: the concept of happiness, i.e. self-reported level of satisfaction with income and life, and relative deprivation/satisfaction, i.e. the gaps between the individual's income and the incomes of all individuals richer/poorer than him. Operationalizing both concepts using micro panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for subjective well-being dependingmore on relative satisfaction than on absolute levels of income. This finding holds even after controlling for other influential factors in a multivariate setting.

Keywords: Relative deprivation; Satisfaction; Subjective well-being; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 p.
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.42570.de/dp449.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Subjective Well-Being and Relative Deprivation: An Empirical Link (2004)
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:diw:diwwpp:dp449

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().