Who Compares to Whom? The Anatomy of Income Comparisons in Europe

By Andrew E. Clark, Claudia Senik. Social Science Research Network, 2010

740 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article provides unprecedented direct evidence from large-scale survey data on both the intensity (how much?) and direction (to whom?) of income comparisons. Income comparisons are considered to be at least somewhat important by three-quarters of Europeans. They are associated with both lower levels of subjective well-being and a greater demand for income redistribution. The rich compare less and are happier than average when they do, which latter is consistent with relative income theory. With respect to the direction of comparisons, colleagues are the most frequentlycited reference group. Those who compare to colleagues are happier than those who compare to other benchmarks.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5b1da2d1dd1910deabe9472a1b8792e936e3c95

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Citations in the corpus

Poor, or Just Feeling Poor? On Using Subjective Data in Measuring Poverty (2012, background): “22 See Oswald (1997), Frank (1997), Frey and Stutzer (2002), Clark, Frijters, and Shields (2008) and Clark and Senik (2010).”
Why Income Inequality Is Dissatisfying—Perceptions of Social Status and the Inequality-Satisfaction Link in Europe (2019, background): “Inter-individual differences in the frequency with which individuals compare themselves with others (Schneider and Schupp, 2014) and the inherent difficulties involved in the selection of comparison referents (Clark and Senik, 2010) make it difficult to measure the effect of relative deprivation on ”
Did the Decline in Social Connections Depress Americans’ Happiness? (2013, background): “Also, direct evidence about the intensity and the direction of income comparisons is available (Clark and Senik, 2010).”
Status Concerns as a Motive for Crime? (2015, background): “…have been confirmed in several empirical studies, among them Alpizar et al. (2005), Carlsson et al. (2007), Carlsson and Qin (2010), Caporale et al. (2009), Clark et al. (2008), Clark and Senik (2010), Johansson-Stenman et al. (2002), Solnick and Hemenway (1998, 2005), and Solnick et al. (2007).”
Will GDP Growth Increase Happiness in Developing Countries? (2011, methodology): “Analyzing the data from the third wave of the European Social Survey, Clark and Senik (2010) focused on the answers to the question “How important is it to you to compare your income with other people’s incomes?” across European countries.”
Attitudes to Income Inequality: Experimental and Survey Evidence (2014, background): “Direct information on who is in the individual’s reference group in survey data is very rare (an exception is Clark and Senik, 2010).”
Identity, Inequality, and Happiness: Evidence from Urban China (2012, background): “In Clark and Senik (2010) European research, they discovered that Europeans are more willing to use friends and colleagues as their object of reference, essentially because there is no institutional segmentation of European society into different groups.”
World happiness report (2012, background): “Gardner & Oswald (2006); Clark et al. (2008a). 150. Piketty (2003). 151. Di Tella et al. (2003); Alesina et al. (2004). 152. Blanchflower (2008); Clark et al.”
Crowding in public transport: Who cares and why? (2017, result): “This data allows a direct assessment of the perception of crowding and its impact on the satisfaction of PT users is in line with the empirical literature on subjective well-being (Kahneman and Krueger, 2006) or job satisfaction (Clark and Senik, 2010).”
Is happiness different from flourishing? Cross-Country Evidence from the ESS (2011, background): “Wave 3 of the ESS, collected in 2006/2007, covers 25 different countries and contains a special module on well-being (see Huppert et al., 2009, and Clark and Senik, 2010).”
International Happiness: A New View on the Measure of Performance (2011, background): “(2007), Clark and Senik (2010), Daly, Oswald, Wilson, and Wu (2010), and Layard (2010). In its latest incarnation, some authors have begun to argue empirically that ordinal rank may be what matters to humans (Brown, Gardner, Oswald, and Qian, 2008, reviewed the evidence).”