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タイトル
  • en The Relative Utility Hypothesis With and Without Self-reported Reference Wages
作成者
アクセス権 metadata only access
主題
  • Other Subjective well-being
  • Other relative utility
  • Other reference wages
内容注記
  • Other en November 2010, Revised July 2012
  • Other en 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 their coworkers earn relatively higher wages. In contrast with other tests of the relative utility hypothesis in the literature, our estimation relies on workers’ self-reported beliefs of their peers’ wages, which we argue are more closely aligned to the “true” reference-group benchmark than the assumed comparison income measures employed in other studies. Second, the article shows important heterogeneous effects of both absolute and relative income on happiness. In particular, workers who are better able to accurately predict their peers’wages seem to experience both greater utility of higher own income and greater disutility of higher relative income. Third, we assess the validity of different methodologies that the literature has employed to construct comparison income measures and find significant discrepancies, particularly when reference income is derived from Mincer equations–a common approach in other studies. We demonstrate that such discrepancies stem from the difficulty in finding valid exclusion restrictions that help identify the relative income effect on happiness. In the absence of self-reported reference wages, we propose a simple IV strategy that does not eliminate the lack of consistency but delivers a lower bound of the “true” effect.
出版者 en The Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University
日付
    Issued2012-07 , Updated2012-07
言語
  • eng
資源タイプ technical report
資源識別子 HDL https://hdl.handle.net/11094/13626
関連
  • references URI https://www.iser.osaka-u.ac.jp/library/dp/2010/DP0798R.pdf
収録誌情報
  • en Institute of Social and Economic Research Discussion Papers
  • 798
コンテンツ更新日時 2023-10-20