This paper uses an unusual administrative dataset covering the universe of French hospitals to consider hospital employment: this is consistently higher in public hospitals than in Not-For-Profit (NFP) or private hospitals, even controlling for a number of measures of hospital output. NFP...

The authors test the hypothesis that individual effort on the job depends both on one's own income and on the individual's position in the relevant income distribution. Combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with multi-country ISSP survey data, they analyze the extent to which...

We contribute to the literature on well-being and comparisons by appealing to new Danish data dividing the country up into around 9,000 small neighbourhoods. Administrative data provides us with the income of every person in each of these neighbourhoods. This income information is matched to...

Previous empirical work has shown that the self-employed are generally more satisfied than salaried workers. This paper contributes to the existing literature in two ways. First, using French data from the ECHP and British data from the BHPS, we investigate the domains over which this...

This paper combines ISSP survey data and experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game to determine the effect of status or relative income on work effort. We find a strong effect of others’ incomes on individual effort decisions in both datasets. The individual’s rank in the income...

The statistical analysis of cross-section data very often reveals a U-shaped relationship between subjective well-being and age. This paper uses fourteen waves of British panel data to distinguish between two potential explanations of this shape: a pure life-cycle or aging effect, and a fixed...

This paper models the relationship between income and reported well-being using latent class techniques applied to panel data from twelve European countries. Introducing both intercept and slope heterogeneity into this relationship, we strongly reject the hypothesis that individuals transform...

A number of recent papers have found evidence of interdependencies in utility functions, in that, ceteris paribus, individual well-being falls as others' mean income or consumption increases. This paper asks if, in addition, the distribution of income in the reference group matters. I consider...

The paper uses 15 waves of BHPS data to provide an integrated analysis of the roles of both individual social status and upward mobility relative to own parents on job and life satisfaction, preferences for redistribution, pro-public sector attitudes and voting. Both greater individual social...