We study the effect of the level of inequality in society on individual well being using a total of 123,668 answers to a survey question about ?happiness?. We find that individuals have a lower tendency to report themselves happy when inequality is high, even after controlling for individual...

The answer to the question posed in the title is 'yes.' Using a total of 128,106 answers to a survey question about happiness,' we find that there is a large, negative and significant effect of inequality on happiness in Europe but not in the US. There are two potential explanations. First,...

We test for whether, once "basic needs" are satisfied, there is happiness adaptation to further gains in income using three data sets. Individual German Panel Data from 1985-2000, and data on the well-being of over 600,000 people in a panel of European countries from 1975-2002, shows different...

We note some problems in Alesina and Angeletos (2005) and suggest a way to maintain the key insight of that paper, which is that a demand for fairness could lead to different economic systems such as those observed in France versus the US (multiple equilibria)