What explains life satisfaction? Relative income or rank income? The case of Ecuador

Hugo Nicolás Acosta-González; Oscar David Marcenaro-Gutiérrez

doi:10.1080/13504851.2020.1861193

What explains life satisfaction? Relative income or rank income? The case of Ecuador

Hugo Nicolás Acosta-González^*, Oscar David Marcenaro-Gutiérrez

^*Corresponding author for this work

Faculty of Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

We test whether various measures of relative income and rank income hypothesis explain life satisfaction in Ecuador. We found robust evidence that the rank position of the income within the reference group explains life satisfaction. In contrast, the effect of relative income measures on happiness is sensitive to the variables used to construct the reference group.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	195-199
Number of pages	5
Journal	Applied Economics Letters
Volume	29
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2020.1861193
State	Published - 10 Dec 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Funding

We acknowledge the training received from the University of Malaga PhD Program in Economics and Business [Programa de Doctorado en Economía y Empresa de la Universidad de Malaga].

Funders	Funder number
Universidad de Málaga

Keywords

Ecuador
happiness
life satisfaction
rank
Relative income

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10.1080/13504851.2020.1861193

Cite this

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abstract = "We test whether various measures of relative income and rank income hypothesis explain life satisfaction in Ecuador. We found robust evidence that the rank position of the income within the reference group explains life satisfaction. In contrast, the effect of relative income measures on happiness is sensitive to the variables used to construct the reference group.",

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What explains life satisfaction? Relative income or rank income? The case of Ecuador

Abstract

Bibliographical note

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Keywords

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