Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Adaption to Poverty in Long-Run Panel Data

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on potential adaptation to poverty. We use panel data on almost 45,800 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2011 to show first that life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of contemporaneous poverty. We then reveal that there is little evidence of adaptation within a poverty spell: poverty ...

Poverty Comparisons

There has been considerable interest in contextual effects on well-being. The size of the relationship between own individual ill-health and unemployment, for example, has been shown to depend on the extent of ill-health and unemployment in the local area. We here use almost 30 years of German panel data to ask whether such contextual effects also apply to income poverty. We do so by looking at the ...

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

Happy House: Spousal Weight and Individual Well-Being

We use life satisfaction and Body Mass Index (BMI) information from three waves of the SOEP to test for social interactions in BMI between spouses. Social interactions require that the cross-partial effect of partner’s weight and own weight in the utility function be positive. Using life satisfaction as a utility proxy, semi-parametric regressions show that the correlation between satisfaction and ...

Heterogeneity and Measures of Well-being: Evidence from Twelve European Countries

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 ...

The Great Happiness Moderation

This paper shows that within-country happiness inequality has fallen in the majority of countries that have experienced positive income growth over the last forty years, in particular in developed countries. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, which states that the time trend in average happiness is flat during episodes of long-run income growth. This mean-preserving ...

The Great Happiness Moderation: Well-being Inequality during Episodes of Income Growth

Economic Growth Evens Out Happiness: Evidence from Six Surveys

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has dropped in countries that experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the "very unhappy" and the "perfectly happy". The extension of public amenities has certainly contributed to this greater happiness ...

Income and happiness: Evidence, explanations and economic implications

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

The well-known Easterlin paradox points out that average happiness has remained constant over time despite sharp rises in GNP per head. At the same time, a micro literature has typically found positive correlations between individual income and individual measures of subjective well-being. This paper suggests that these two findings are consistent with the presence of relative income terms in the utility ...