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 increases individual well-being. We find only weak evidence that Germans are inequality averse. Inequality reduction ...
This paper explores the relationship between two well-established con-cepts of measuring individual well-being: the concept of happiness, i.e. self-reported level of satisfaction with income and life, and relative deprivation/satisfaction, i.e. the gaps between the individual's income and the incomes of all individuals richer/poorer than him. Operationalizing both concepts using micro panel data from ...
This paper uses a set of panel data from happiness surveys, jointly with data on per capita income and pollution, to examine how self-reported well-being varies with prosperity and environmental conditions. This approach permits to show that citizens care about prosperity and the environment, and to calculate the trade-off people are willing to make between them. The paper finds that air pollution ...
We use fourteen waves of the German panel data to ask whether individuals, after life and labour market events, return to some baseline wellbeing level. Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, significant lag and lead effects are present. Men are more affected by labour market events (unemployment and layoffs) and women by life events (marriage and divorce). ...
In this paper, the concept of Income Satisfaction Inequality is operationalized on the basis of individual responses to an Income Satisfaction question posed in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Income satisfaction is the subjective analogue of the objective income concept and includes objective income inequality as a special case. The paper introduces a method to decompose Income Satisfaction ...