Using over one million observations, from 6 Transition countries and 14 "old" European countries, we show that, in stable EU economies, other people's income affects my utility directly, through comparison effects, whereas in more volatile Transition economies it affects me indirectly, in a...

Is actual inequality accurately translated into people’s perceptions, and what are the genuine hopes of citizens? Our contribution offers insights into how the reality and two subjective dimensions of inequality, namely perceptions, and desires, interact. Using data from the Eurobarometer, we...

Is actual income inequality accurately translated into people's perceptions, and what are the genuine hopes of citizens? Our contribution offers insights into how the reality and two subjective dimensions of income inequality, namely perceptions, and desires, interact. Using data from the...

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...

This paper analyses data from the Irish Household Budget Surveys of 1987, 1994 and 1999 to examine the evolution of inequality of income and expenditure over that period. The paper calculates Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and also the Growth Incidence Curve of Ravallion and Chen to...

We use a survey method designed to capture whether the consumption sharing ability of households varies systematically at different levels of well being. Evidence from Cyprus reconfirms our previous results from other countries, that household consumption economies of scale increase as the...

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint...

We link life-satisfaction data to inequality of the pre- and post-government income distribution at the regional level, to estimate the degree of inequality aversion. Three different inequality measures are used. In addition, we investigate whether a reduction in inequality by the state...

Different family types may have a fixed flow of consumption costs, related to subsistence needs. We use a survey method in order to identify and estimate such a fixed component of spending for different families. Our method involves making direct questions about the linkup between aggregate...

Expectations and information about the growth of GDP per capita have a large influence on decisions made by private and public economic agents. It will be argued here that GDP (per capita) is far from a robust indicator of social welfare, and that its use as such must be regarded as a serious...