Few data are available from middle income countries regarding economic circumstances of households in which older people live. Many such settings have experienced rapid demographic, social and economic change, alongside increasing pension coverage. Population-based household surveys in rural and urban catchment areas in Peru, Mexico and China. Participating households were selected from all hou...

I n 1974, Richard A. Easterlin, a coauthor of the work by Easterlin et al. (1) in PNAS, published a seminal article (2) that has generated a huge literature. It sought to explain why the happiness score in the United States (and elsewhere) had stayed roughly constant, whereas income per capita had trended up. This evidence has come to be known as the Easterlin Paradox. His explanation was that ...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To assess the degree to which postsurgical adjustment in patients with breast cancer and their partners depends on the nature of the patient-partner dyad relationship. DESIGN Secondary data analysis from a randomized controlled trial. SETTING Three cancer centers and one suburban community hospital in New York. SAMPLE 205 patient-partner dyads (112 intimate-partner, 58 ...

The Effects of Wealth and Income on Subjective Well-Being and Ill-Being The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that household income has statistically significant but only small effects on measures of subjective well-being. Income, however, is clearly an imperfect measure of the economic circumstances of households. Using data drawn from the 2001 and 2002 waves of the Hou...

Drawing on the distinction between envy and signaling effects in income comparison, this paper uses 307,465 observations for subjective well-being and its covariates from Germany, 1990-2009, to study whether the nature of income comparison has changed in the process of economic development, and how such changes are related to changes in the nature of income formation. By conceptualizing a perso...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the importance of dcomparison incomeT for individual well-being or happiness. In other words, the influence of the income of a reference group on individual well-being is examined. The main novelty is that various hypotheses are tested: the importance of the own income, the relevance of the income of the reference group and of the distance between th...

AIM To examine the differences in subjective well-being among people with different household income. METHOD Data were obtained from the national survey conducted in June 2005, in which a representative sample of 896 participants were administered a questionnaire on several measures of subjective well-being as follows: happiness, life satisfaction, and satisfaction with different life domains...

We explored whether rising income in nations is associated with increasing subjective well-being (SWB), with several advances over earlier work. Our methods are improved in that across time, the same well-being questions were asked in the same order, and we employed broad and equivalent representative samples over time from a large number of nations. We also assessed psychosocial factors that m...

Economists in recent decades have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to well-being. In this paper, we review the evidence to assess the importance of absolute and relative income in ...

This paper investigates how material well-being has changed over time for those at the bottom of the distributions of income and consumption. We document the sharp differences between recent trends in measured income and consumption, focusing on families headed by a single mother. Since the early 1990s, income in the bottom decile has fallen by nearly 30 percent, while income has risen by more ...