This paper examines whether income transparency - the public release of citizens' income information - affects support for redistribution. We leverage a quasi-experiment in Finland, where every year on the so-called tax day, the authorities release income information on Finland's top earners to...

We study information aggregation problems where to a set of measures a single measure of the same dimension is associated. The collection of measures could represent the beliefs of agents about the state of the world, and the aggregate would then represent the beliefs of the population....

This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect onsubjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types ofbenchmarks...

This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations onunemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricterenforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higherunemployment, less income...

Constructing pseudo-panel data from successive Current Population Surveys, this paper analyzes earnings inequality in husband and wife families over the life cycle and over time. Particular attention is devoted to the role of labor supply in influencing measures of earnings inequality. Compact...

The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, we propose a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, we provide corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate...

This paper asks how income distribution affects individual well-being and tries to explore the idea that this relation depends on the degree of mobility and uncertainty in the economy. It mostly concentrates on the relation between satisfaction and reference income (defined as the income of...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP), it is shown that income comparison with persons who are better off has a clear impact on the job satisfaction of West German full-time employees. Two contrary effects can be identified. On the one hand, there is an aversion to...

Experimental evidence has convincingly shown the existence of reciprocal inclinations, i.e., a tendency for people to respond in-kind to hostile or kind actions. Little is known, however, about: (i) the prevalence of reciprocity in the population, (ii) individual determinants of reciprocity,...

This paper considers the effect of status or relative income on work effort combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with ISSP survey data. We find a consistent negative effect of others' incomes on individual effort in both datasets. The individual's rank in the income...