This paper examines whether the subjective well-being of migrants is responsive to fluctuations in macroeconomic conditions in their country of origin. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 1984 to 2009 and macroeconomic variables for 24 countries of origin, we exploit country-year...

As their environment changes, migrants constitute an interesting group to study the effect of relative income on subjective well-being. This paper focuses on the huge population of rural-to-urban migrants in China. Using a novel dataset, we find that the well-being of migrants depends on several...

This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax...

The paper investigates the impact of remittances on the relative concerns of households in rural China. Using the Rural to Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) dataset we estimate a series of well-being functions to simultaneously explore the relative concerns with respect to income and remittances....

We investigated attitudes toward positionality among rural farmers in Northern Ethiopia, using a tailored survey experiment. On average, we found positional concerns neither in income per se nor in income from aid projects among the farmers. These results support the claim that positional...

This paper investigates how ethnic diversity, measured by the immigrants' countries of origin, influences the well-being of the host country. Using panel data from Germany for the period 1998 to 2012, we find a positive effect of ethnic diversity on the well-being of German citizens. To...

This paper uses both subjective well-being and survey experimental data to analyze how people's positional concerns regarding income and goods vary with age. The subjective well-being approach is mainly based on German panel data for the period 1984-2009 (German Socio-Economic Panel), while the...

This paper examines the effect of religion on positional concerns using survey experiments. We focus on two of the dimensions of religion - degree of religiosity and religious festivals. By conducting the experiments during both the most important day of Ramadan (the Night of Power) and a day...

The main objective of this paper is to propose a systematic approach to empirically analyse the effect of remittances on the utility of migrants, as proxied by their subjective well-being (SWB). Using data from a new survey on China (RUMiC), we estimate models in which a measure of subjective...

This paper examines the effect of immigration directly on the overall utility of natives. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to explore such nexus. Combining information from the German Socio-Economic Panel dataset with detailed local labour market characteristics for the...