The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...

This paper evaluates the importance of middle class vulnerability to poverty for subjective well-being (happiness) in European countries. Using the special module of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions micro-data on well-being and national aggregates from the World...