Existing work on the economics of well-being suggests that a person's subjective well-being depends to a large degree on his relative standing within his social environment. In this paper, we examine whether access to modern information and telecommunication technologies has an impact on...

This paper provides unprecedented direct evidence from large-scale survey data on both the intensity (how much?) and direction (to whom?) of income comparisons. Income comparisons are considered to be at least somewhat important by three-quarters of Europeans. They are associated with both lower...

Income comparisons are among the key mechanisms used to explain satisfaction and happiness, among other outcomes. Yet progress on the questions of who people use as social referents and whether differential selection patterns exist can only be made based on valid and reliable measures of pay...

This paper provides unprecedented direct evidence from large-scale survey data on both the intensity (how much?) and direction (to whom?) of income comparisons. Income comparisons are considered to be at least somewhat important by three-quarters of Europeans. They are associated with both lower...

Income comparisons are among the key mechanisms used to explain satisfaction and happiness, among other outcomes. Yet progress on the questions of who people use as social referents and whether differential selection patterns exist can only be made based on valid and reliable measures of pay...

This paper provides unprecedented direct evidence from large-scale survey data on both the intensity (how much?) and direction (to whom?) of income comparisons. Income comparisons are considered to be at least somewhat important by three-quarters of Europeans. They are associated with both lower...

We review the survey and experimental findings in the literature on attitudes to income inequality. We interpret the latter as any disparity in incomes between individuals. We classify these findings into two broad types of individual attitudes towards the income distribution in a society: the...

Despite the relatively extensive research on pay levels and the consequences of income disparities, little is known about which reference groups people choose for comparative evaluation of personal income and why different selection patterns emerge. The aim of this paper is to dig deeper for...

We examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using data from the British Cohort Study. Our SWB measures encapsulates both life satisfaction and mental health, and we consider both relative and absolute movements in income. We find that relative income mobility is...