Improvement in incomes distribution has been one of the major targets of Iranian policy makers; however, during 1991 to 2004, policy regimes have shifted frequently, and evaluation of the effect of policy regime shifts in Iran’s distributional changes due to these policy regime shifts could be...

Theories of social comparison have a long presence in the social sciences and have provided many useful insights. In economics, the idea of comparison, aspiration or relative income belongs to this theoretical framework. The first systematic usages of this idea can be found in the works of...

Research on the effects of positional concerns on individuals’ attitudes and behavior is sorely lacking. To address this deficiency, we use the International Social Survey Programme 1998 data on 25’000 individuals from 26 countries to investigate the impact of relative income position on...

We present an empirical model aimed at testing the relative income hypothesis and the effect of deprivation relative to mean income on subjective well-being. The main concern is to deal with subjective panel data in an ordered response model where error homoskedasticity is not assumed. A...

The formidable economic growth of China in the past few decades led to outstanding improvements in virtually all objective indicators of standards of life. However, these objective records are in striking contrast with subjective ones. Between 1990 and 2007, Chinese average subjective well-being...

To what extent is economic growth liable to improve people’s subjective well-being in the long run? Recent studies identified three possible answers: economic growth matters a great deal; economic growth does not matter at all; economic growth matters, but other things matter more. Each of...

Motivated by both: academic research illuminating the diminishing returns nature of the relationship between income and subjective well-being, and the recent development of composite indices as alternatives to GDP, this paper seeks to analyze empirically the relationship between a variety of...

Happiness research is on the rise, but is confounded by competing definitions of subjective well-being based on co-existing concepts, resulting in differing measures and giving rise to different potential policy applications. This paper motivates the societal necessity for using well-being...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

We argue that perceived fairness of the income generation process affects the association between income inequality and subjective well-being, and that there are systematic differences in this regard between countries that are characterized by a high or, respectively, low level of actual...