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Economic Comparison and Group Identity: Lessons from India
Xavier Fontaine,Katsunori Yamada +1 more
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The authors found that within and between-caste comparisons appear to reduce well-being, and that comparisons between rival castes are found to decrease wellbeing three times more than within castes.Abstract:
The caste issue dominates a large part of India's social and political life. Caste shapes one's identity. Furthermore, strong tensions exist between castes. Using subjective well-being data, we assess the role economic comparisons play in this society. We focus on both within and between-castes comparisons. Within-caste comparisons appear to reduce well-being. Comparisons between rival castes are found to decrease well-being three times more. We link these results to two models in which economic comparison triggers the actual caste-based behaviours (castes' political demands, discrimination).read more
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Does Economic Growth Raise Happiness in China
John Knight,Ramani Gunatilaka +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented a methodologically and substantively innovative explanation for the paradox that various measures of satisfaction with life or happiness in China appear not to have risen in recent years, despite China's remarkable growth of income per capita.
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Consumption peer effects and utility needs in India
TL;DR: In this paper, a peer effects model where mean expenditures of consumers in one's peer group affect one's utility through perceived consumption needs is constructed, where very few members of each peer group are observed.
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Consumption peer effects and utility needs in India
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors construct a peer effects model where mean expenditures of consumers in one's peer group affect utility through perceived consumption needs, and show welfare gains of billions of dollars per year might be possible by replacing government transfers of private goods to households with providing public goods or services, to reduce peer effects.
Necessary Luxuries: Evidence from India on Peer Eects in Consumption
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the problem of keeping up with the Jones' effect can be solved by using nonlinearity inherent in de- mand functions to overcome the identi-cation problems that social interaction models like these typically suer from.
Necessary Luxuries: A New Social Interactions Model, Applied to Keeping Up With the Joneses in India
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the average consumption of one's peers is a function of the quantity vector that satisfies one's perceived needs and show how dollar costs of these peer-ects on welfare can be obtained in these models.
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The Theory of the Leisure Class
TL;DR: The Pecuniary standard of living is defined in this paper as "conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption, and higher learning as an expression of the pecuniary culture".
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Relative Income, Happiness and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles
TL;DR: In this article, the authors review the evidence on relative income from the subjective well-being literature and discuss the relation (or not) between happiness and utility, and discuss some nonhappiness research (behavioral, experimental, neurological) related to income comparisons.
Journal ArticleDOI
Relative income, happiness, and utility : an explanation for the Easterlin paradox and other puzzles
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors review the evidence on relative income from the subjective well-being literature and discuss the relation (or not) between happiness and utility, and discuss some nonhappiness research (behavioral, experimental, neurological) related to income comparisons.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Theory of the Leisure Class
TL;DR: The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen as mentioned in this paper is a well-known theory of leisure classes and can be found at the Monthly Review website. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article.
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Income and well-being: an empirical analysis of the comparison income effect
TL;DR: In this paper, an empirical analysis of the importance of comparison income for individual well-being or happiness is presented, where the authors use a self-reported measure of satisfaction with life as a measure of individual wellbeing.
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