Wage Satisfaction and Reference Wages

Claudia Senik ()
Additional contact information
Claudia Senik: PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: That wage satisfaction depends on reference wage is now an acquis of the empirical happiness literature. Employees care about their coworkers' wage. They compare to different notions of reference wage and suffer from disadvantageous comparisons, more than they enjoy advantageous ones. However, reference wage sometimes acts in a positive way, as a carrier of information. In terms of methods, the empirical literature has developed in three stages. First, it started by enquiring about the statistical association between a notion of reference wage (or reference income) as defined by researchers, and self-declared satisfaction. Second, some researchers tried to elicit the direction of income comparisons by including direct questions in large surveys of the population. Third, researchers attempted to provide experimental evidence of the causal effect of comparisons on satisfaction (beyond the simple statistical association) using natural, field, and lab experiments.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Klaus F. Zimmermann. Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, Springer, 2021, 978-3-319-57365-6

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:halshs-03342815

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().