The authors test the hypothesis that individual effort on the job depends both on one's own income and on the individual's position in the relevant income distribution. Combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with multi-country ISSP survey data, they analyze the extent to which...

A new perspective on life satisfaction and well-being over the life courseWhat makes people happy? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human priorities and to promote public policy changes that are based on what really matters to people. Drawing on a range of...

The degree to which workers identify with their firms, and how hard they are willing to work for them, would seem to be key variables for the understanding of both firm productivity and individual labour-market outcomes. This paper uses repeated crosssection ISSP data from 1997 and 2005 to...

This paper provides an experimental examination of the effects of ostracism on cooperation. Ostracism is one of the most radical forms of peer pressure. More generally, ostracism is the exclusion of disapproved individuals from interaction with a social group. By performing a laboratory...

Purpose – It is known that the self‐employed are generally more satisfied than salaried workers. The aim of this paper is to test whether this phenomenon is particularly found for the first‐generation self‐employed. Design/methodology/approach – French and British panel data are...