Recent economic research on international comparisons of subjective well-being suffers from several important biases due to the potential incomparability of response scales within and across countries. In this paper we concentrate on self-reported satisfaction with income in two countries: The...

To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such as "do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the kind or amount of work you can do?" A possible drawback of such a measure is the possibility that different...

To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such as do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the kind or amount of work you can do? A possible drawback of such a measure is the possibility that different groups...

Individuals are influenced by the types of people with whom they associate and who form their social networks. These social interactions may affect individual and social norms. We develop a direct test of this using Dutch survey data on how respondents evaluate work disability of hypothetical...

We study the effect of attrition and other forms of non-response on the representativity over time of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) sample born 1931-1941; the sample was initially drawn in 1992. Although some baseline characteristics of respondents do appear correlated with non-response over...

We analyze the determinants of global life satisfaction in two countries (The Netherlands and the U.S.), by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions. We find global life satisfaction of happiness is well-described by four domains: job or daily activities, social...

This paper investigates the role of pain in determining self-reported work disability in the US, the UK and The Netherlands. Even if identical questions are asked, cross-country differences in reported work disability remain substantial. In the US and the Netherlands, respondent evaluations of...

Many western industrialized countries face strong budgetary pressures due to the aging of the baby boom generations and the general trends toward earlier ages of retirement. The authors use the American PSID and the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to explain differences in prevalence...

Comparing self-assessed indicators of subjective outcomes such as health, work disability, political efficacy, job satisfaction, etc. across countries or socio-economic groups is often hampered by the fact that different groups use systematically different response scales. Anchoring vignettes...

This paper investigates the role of pain in affecting self-reported work disability and employment of elderly workers in the US. We investigate pain and its relationship to work disability and work in a dynamic panel data model, using six biennial waves from the Health and Retirement Study. We...