Income Inequality and Well-Being in the U.S.: Evidence of Geographic-Scale- and Measure-Dependence

John Ifcher (), Homa Zarghamee and Carol Graham
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John Ifcher: Santa Clara University

No 10155, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: U.S. income inequality has risen dramatically in recent decades. Researchers consistently find that greater income inequality measured at the state or national level is associated with diminished subjective well-being (SWB) in the U.S. We conduct the first multi-scale analysis (i.e., at the ZIP-code, MSA, and state levels) of the inequality-SWB relationship using SWB data from the U.S. Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index and income inequality data from the American Community Survey. We use the rich set of well-being measures afforded by the dataset (evaluative, positive- and negative-affective hedonic, and health measures) to examine the consistency of the relationship. We find that the relationship is both scale-dependent and measure- dependent: income inequality is SWB-diminishing in large regions for all measures, SWB-diminishing in small regions for negative-affective hedonic measures, and SWB-improving in small regions for most other measures. Lastly, we find that taking all regions together, the net relationship between income inequality and SWB is negative.

Keywords: subjective well-being; income inequality; happiness; distribution of income; health; scale-dependence; measure-dependence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 D6 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-ltv and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Journal Article: Income inequality and well-being in the U.S.: evidence of geographic-scale- and measure-dependence (2019)
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