Do Danes and Italians Rate Life Satisfaction in the Same Way? Using Vignettes to Correct for Individual-Specific Scale Biases

Viola Angelini, Danilo Cavapozzi (), Luca Corazzini and Omar Paccagnella ()

No 90, "Marco Fanno" Working Papers from Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno"

Abstract: Self-reported life satisfaction is highly heterogeneous across similar countries. We show that this phenomenon can be largely explained by the fact that individuals adopt different scales and benchmarks in evaluating themselves. Using a cross sectional dataset on individuals aged 50 and over in ten European countries, we compare estimates from an Ordered Probit in which life satisfaction scales are invariant across respondents with those from a Hopit model in which vignettes are used to correct for individual-specific scale biases. We find that variations in response scales explain a large part of the differences found in raw data. Moreover, the crosscountry ranking in life satisfaction dramatically depends on scale biases.

Keywords: Life satisfaction; scale biases; vignette; counterfactuals. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C42 D12 I31 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2009-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economia.unipd.it/sites/economia.unipd.it/files/20090090.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Danes and Italians Rate Life Satisfaction in the Same Way? Using Vignettes to Correct for Individual-Specific Scale Biases (2014)
Working Paper: Do Danes and Italians Rate Life Satisfaction in the Same Way? Using Vignettes to Correct for Individual-Specific Scale Biases (2011)
Working Paper: Do Danes and Italians Rate Life Satisfaction in the Same Way? Using Vignettes to Correct for Individual-Specific Scale Biases (2008)
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:pad:wpaper:0090

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in "Marco Fanno" Working Papers from Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno" Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Raffaele Dei Campielisi ().