Does Income Deprivation Affect People’s Mental Well-being?
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper uses panel data from the 2002-2010 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel dataset (SOEP) to assess the impact of income deprivation upon individual mental wellbeing. Unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for by means of a random effects model extended to include a Mundlak term and explicit controls for the respondents’ personality traits. The paper shows that conditional on the household income level a less favourable relative position in the income distribution results into lower mental well-being. This effect is not statistically significant among women, though. Among men, a one-standard deviation increase in income deprivation is found to be as harmful as reduction in permanent household income of almost 30%. Interestingly, this impact is found to differ among individuals endowed with different sets of non-cognitive skills. We claim that policies, practices and initiatives aimed at improving well-being among European citizens require a better understanding of individuals’ sensitiveness to others’ income.
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