Heterogeneity in Reported Well-Being: Evidence from Twelve European Countries

By Andrew E. Clark, Fabrice Etilé, F. Postel-Vinay, Claudia Senik, Karine Van der Straeten. Social Science Research Network, 2005

261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper models the relationship between income and reported well-being using latent class techniques applied to panel data from twelve European countries. Introducing both intercept and slope heterogeneity into this relationship, we strongly reject the hypothesis that individuals transform income into well-being in the same way. We show that both individual characteristics and country of residence are strong predictors of the four classes we identify. We expect that differences in the marginal effect of income on well-being across classes will be reflected in both behaviour and preferences for redistribution.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/546087ba3072ac60245049b6063b843fa70513a7

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Citations in the corpus

The Relation Between Life Satisfaction and the Material Situation: A Re-Evaluation Using Alternative Measures (2010, methodology): “This was for example an issue in the above cited paper by Clark et al. (2005) , who showed that the latent classes of respondents identified by their analysis did also differ with regard to their national composition.”
Do Danes and Italians Rate Life Satisfaction in the Same Way? Using Vignettes to Correct for Individual‐Specific Scale Biases (2014, unknown): “, 2007) or latent class techniques (Clark et al., 2005) can be used in order to take into account time-invariant DIF bias.”
The influence of social relationships on pro-environment behaviors (2012, background): “In particular, when we estimate latent cluster 17 In a recent paper, Dellavigna, List, and Malmendier [10] conducts an experiment that shows social pressure increases donations.”
The Rural–Urban Divide in China: Income but Not Happiness? (2010, background): “This methodological problem is recognised in, for instance, Clark et al. (2005). Investigating life satisfaction in 12 countries using a European panel survey, the authors find heterogeneity in both the intercepts and slopes of their equations but recognise that they are unable to separate heterogen”
Happiness Economics from 35,000 Feet (2012, unknown): “(2008), who examine the impact of health status on the marginal utility of income, and Clark et al. (2005), who estimate different SWB functions for different classes of individuals emerging from their data.”
The Effect of Income on General Life Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction (2009, methodology): “A recent example for such an approach is the study by Clark et al. (2005) who used GLS data from the European Community Household Panel.”
Who Compares to Whom? The Anatomy of Income Comparisons in Europe (2010, background): “Only rarely is any heterogeneity in the relationship between well-being and income addressed (one exception is the latent class analysis in Clark et al., 2005).”
Sustainability and consumption (2011, background): “Happiness, as a surrogate for utility maximization ( Clark et al. 2005 ; S en1987) in our theory, connotes a wellordered state of affairs, which is more than a subjective state of pleasure.”
Relative Income, Happiness and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles (2008, unknown): “In addition, the slope of the income-happiness relationship is not necessarily the same between groups (Clark et al., 2005; Frijters et al., 2004a; Lelkes, 2006).”
The Development of Capability Indicators (2009, methodology): “One method of allowing for this source of heterogeneity would be to use person-specific effects, as indeed Clark et al. (2005) suggest, although this option is not open to us as we have only cross-sectional data to work with.”