Recent studies focused on testing the Easterlin hypothesis (happiness and national income correlate in the cross-section but not over time) on a global level. We make a case for testing the Easterlin hypothesis at the country level where individual panel data allow exploiting important...

Nonparametric density estimates and a generalized decomposition technique are employed to explore the role that changes in family structure in the 1980s and 1990s played in observed shifts in the U.S. distribution of family economic well-being. Single-parent families are identified as playing a...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), it is shown that income comparisons 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...

This paper provides a robust normative evaluation of the spectacular growth episode that India has experienced in the last 15 years. Specifically, the paper compares the evolution, between 1998, 1996 and 2001 of the distribution of several important individual attributes on the basis of...

Sleep is an important part of life, with an individual spending an estimated 32 years of her life asleep. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and that...

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on the role of time. We use panel data on 49,000 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2012 to uncover three empirical relationships. First, life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity...

This article documents the historical trend of higher poverty rates in the South compared to the rest of the country. It examines any differences that might exist in how the poverty population in the country as a whole and the poverty population in the South respond to different economic and...

Theory suggests that subjective well-being is affected by income comparisons and adaptation to income. Empirical tests of the effects often rely on self-constructed measures from survey data. This paper shows that results can be highly sensitive to simple parameter changes. Using large-scale...

People gain utility from occupying a higher ranked position in the income distribution of the reference group. This paper investigates whether these gains depend on an individual's set of non-cognitive skills. Using the 2000-2008 waves of the German Socioeconomic Panel dataset (SOEP), a...

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study in order to quantify the economy-wide monetary gains achieved by Household-Size Economies, due to the within-household sharing of goods by individuals living in multi-member households. In most of the twenty countries we examine, we observe a decline...