While there is now something of a consensus in the literature on the economics of happiness that income comparisons to others help determine subjective wellbeing, debate continues over the relative importance of own and reference-group income, in particular in research on the Easterlin paradox....

This article makes three main contributions to the economics of happiness literature. First, using a novel data set of about 90,000 Japanese workers surveyed in annual cross-sections between 1990 and 2004, it demonstrates that individuals experience strong disutility when they perceive that...

This paper uses Japanese data which includes measures of self-declared satisfaction, reference-group income, and the direction and intensity of income comparisons. Relative to Europeans, the Japanese compare more to friends and less to colleagues, and compare their incomes more. The relationship...

We consider a dynamic macroeconomic model of households that regard relative affluence as social status. The measure of relative affluence can be the ratio to, or the difference from, the social average. The two specifications lead to quite different results: under the ratio specification full...

This paper estimates the economic value in the 1980s and 1990s of corporate as sets in Japan,including both tangible and intangible as sets, based on the neo-classical framework of McGrattan and Prescott(2005). Our estimates use anew micro-data set that comprises the accounting statements of all...

Economists have long been aware of utility externalities such as a tendency to compare own income with others'. If welfare losses from income comparisons are significant, any governmental interventions that alter such attitudes may have large welfare consequences. We conduct an original online...

While there is now something of a consensus in the literature on the economics of happiness that income comparisons to others help determine subjective wellbeing, debate continues over the relative importance of own and reference-group income, in particular in research on the Easterlin paradox....

This study augments a second-generation Schumpeterian growth model to employ human capital explicitly. We clarify the general-equilibrium interactions of subsidy policies to Ramp;D and human capital accumulation in a unified framework. Despite a standard intuition that subsidizing these...