Relative Income, Happiness and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles

By Andrew E. Clark, P. Frijters, Michael A. Shields. 2008

3,347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/159b00eccdf9904da3c15e68f67d69a918865dda

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Decision Sciences

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Financial satisfaction over the life course: The influence of assets and liabilities (2011, positive): “…In studies of overall satisfaction with life, income usually shows a significant positive association with well-being (for a recent overview see Clark et al., 2008b), and it can be assumed that this positive effect of income is caused by its impact on financial satisfaction, which in turn is…”
Shattered Dreams: The Effects of Changing the Pension System Late in the Game (2009, background): “difference between one’s own income and the income of a reference group (see for an overview, Clark et al., 2008). Ferrer-i-Carbonell (2005) finds that the income of the reference group is about as important as own income for individual happiness. Calvo, Haverstick and Sass (2007) examine the factor”
Destruction and Distress: Using a Quasi-Experiment to Show the Effects of the September 11 Attacks on Mental Well-Being in the United Kingdom (2011, methodology): “In addition to the seasonal dummies, column 1 also controls for the standard SWB control variables (Clark et al., 2008; Dolan et al., 2008), including gender, age, agesquared, log of real household income, as well as dummies for marital status, labour force status, education, number of children and…”
Income, aspirations and the Hedonic Treadmill in a poor society (2012, background): “There is much economic literature providing evidence for many countries that relative income affects happiness, and generally inferring that endogenous aspirations are the explanation for this effect (well surveyed by Clark et al., 2008).”
Poor, or Just Feeling Poor? On Using Subjective Data in Measuring Poverty (2012, methodology): “18 Clark et al. (2008) review the literature on the income effect on subjective welfare. 19 I focus on application to developing countries. The applications to date include Pradhan and Ravallion (2000) using data for Jamaica and Nepal, Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Van Praag (2001), for Russia, Taddesse an”
The French Unhappiness Puzzle: The Cultural Dimension of Happiness (2014, background): “Although an abundant literature suggests that subjective wellbeing is a valid construct that can be reliably measured (see Layard 2005 or Clark et al. 2008 for useful reviews), the question here is whether international differences in happiness are not due to Frame-ofReference Biases (FORB) and…”
Toward a theory of transformative entrepreneuring: Poverty reduction and conflict resolution in Rwanda's entrepreneurial coffee sector (2013, background): “This issue may become all the more important as a conflict zone moves out of extreme poverty, due to the diminishing correlation between economic wealth and quality of life as nations develop economically (Clark et al., 2008; Easterlin et al., 2010).”
Happiness Adaptation to Income and to Status in an Individual Panel (2010, positive): “3 This is also sometimes called the “hedonic treadmill” hypothesis or the “setpoint” model (see Costa et al., 1987). Easterlin (2003) stresses that the evidence, which is based on small samples, is consistent only with incomplete adaptation.”
Tournaments Without Prizes: Evidence from Personnel Records (2011, positive): “Our findings therefore add to previous studies arguing that workers are affected by relative concerns, whereby increases in others' performance always has a negative effect on own utility (Luttmer, 2005; Charness and Kuhn, 2007; Clark, Frijters and Shields, 2008).”
Life satisfaction and self-employment: a matching approach (2010, background): “…for the robustness of the life satisfaction measure to being treated as cardinal could lie in the fact that individuals seem to convert ordinal response labels into similar numerical values such that these cardinal values equally divide up the response space (Van Praag, 1991; Clark et al., 2008).”
Income, health, and well-being around the world: evidence from the Gallup World Poll. (2008, background): “stances such as employment or marital status (for example, Helliwell, 2003; Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004 ).”
Climate-Resilient Pathways: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Sustainable Development (2014, background): “In many cases, growth in consumption that raises human wellbeing (such as food and health services), especially among populations with incomes rising from low levels, is a catalyst for economic and social development (Clark et al., 2008; Deaton, 2008).”