Where the streets have a name: income comparisons in the US

Abel Brodeur and Sarah Flèche

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper analyses how neighbors' income affect agents' well-being using unprecedented data from the BRFSS and the City of Somerville. We conduct a multi-scale approach at the county, ZIP code and street-levels and find that the association between well-being and neighbors' income follows an inverted U-shaped pattern in the size of the area. We find a negative relationship between well-being and neighbors' income in the county of residence, but the opposite at the ZIP code-level. Our results are consistent with the fact that agents enjoy living in a rich ZIP code but also having poor faraway neighbors since they have preferences for high social status. We test explicitly this interpretation by including amenities and the relative rank in the local income distribution in our model. At the street-level, we find a negative association between neighbors' income and self-reported well-being indicating the presence of income comparisons between very close neighbors.

JEL-codes: C25 D00 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/51529/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US (2013)
Working Paper: Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US (2013)
Working Paper: Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US (2013)
Working Paper: Where the Streets Have a Name: Income Comparisons in the US (2013)
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:ehl:lserod:51529

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().