Inequality and happiness: Insights from Latin America

Abstract

happiness, inequality, Latin America, subjective well-being,

Local neighbors as positives, regional neighbors as negatives: Competing channels in the relationship between others’ income, health, and happiness

“…This is in line with Hirschman & Rothschild (1973) It should be noted that while we use the median of the income distribution in respondents' geographic areas as reference income, there is no reason to assume that only the first moment of the distribution is related to well-being. A substantial literature concerns the relationship between income inequality and SWB (e.g., Alesina et al, 2004;Graham & Felton, 2006;Oishi et al, 2011;Van Praag & Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2009). While it is shown in Section 5.5 that the baseline results hold controlling for ZIPcode and MSA Gini coefficients, the current paper does not present a thorough analysis of the income-inequality-SWB relationship.…”

“…It has been used as a potential explanation for the Easterlin Paradox-whereby, over time at the national level, average SWB does not increase with per capita GDP (Easterlin, 1974;Frank, 2012). 3,4 The relationship between others' income and SWB has been studied using different benchmarks for reference income: geography (e.g., Brodeur & Fleche, 2015;Clark et al, 2009a;Clark & Senik, 2012;Deaton & Stone, 2013;Luttmer, 2005); occupation (e.g., Senik, 2004;2008); demographic characteristics like age, sex, race, and religion (e.g., Dahlin et al, 2014;FitzRoy et al, 2014;Perez-Asenjo, 2011); education (e.g., Graham & Felton, 2006); friends and family (e.g., Senik, 2009); one's own past (e.g., Knight et al, 2009;Senik, 2009);and combinations thereof (e.g., Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2005;McBride, 2010). …”

Institutional Origins of Subjective Well-Being: Estimating the Effects of Economic Freedom on National Happiness

“…Cross-national studies indicate that people living in more unequal societies do not report lower subjective well-being than those living more egalitarian societies. Another strand of literature, using large-scale individual-level happiness reports, advocates that unfairness of economic inequality rather than inequality per se contributes to lower individual subjective well-being which has found empirical support in Graham and Felton (2006), Cramer and Kaufman (2011) and Haggard et al (2013).…”

“…Following earlier attempts to establish the causal effects on subjective well-being (Easterlin 1974(Easterlin , 2001Winkelmann and Winkelmann 2000;Deaton 2008;Graham and Felton 2006;Stevenson and Wolfers 2008;Berg and Veenhoven 2010;Rözer and Kraaykamp 2013;Oishi et al 2013), three additional baseline explanatory variables are considered in our cross-country subjective well-being model: (1) income level, (2) unemployment rate, (3) life expectancy at birth, (4) Gini coefficient, and (5) health expenditure in the share of GDP. First, the data on GDP per capita is from Heston et al (2012) and captures the effect of income level on subjective well-being.…”

Felicidad y Bienestar Psicológico: Estudio Comparativo Entre Argentina y España

“…Por esta razón, estudios como los realizados por Bobowik, Basabe, Páez, Jiménez y Bilbao (2011), Diener (2012, Diener, Tay y Oishi (2013), Galati, Manzano y Sotgiu (2006), Oishi, Koo y Akimoto (2008) y Rentfrow, Mellander y Florida (2009, entre otros, indagan en las diferencias que existen en los niveles de bienestar y felicidad entre las distintas naciones. A su vez, numerosos estudios en el contexto hispanoamericano se han centrado en examinar cómo la felicidad y el bienestar se relacionan con aspectos tales como la salud mental (Barrientos & Martínez, 2014), la educación (Bilbao, 2014), el trabajo y el mercado laboral (Graham & Felton, 2006;Graham & Pettinato, 2001;Kramp, 2014), las distintas etapas vitales (Alvarado & Plaza, 2014;Casas et al, 2015) y el ambiente (Cuñado & Pérez de Gracia, 2013), entre otros. Esto, a su vez, ayuda a entender y analizar los distintos aspectos que conforman el bienestar y la felicidad.…”