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Health and Social Comparison Does Envy Make You Sick ? ∗
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Schoen, Matthias |
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Abstract | This paper investigates the relationship between an individual’s health and relative economic performance. Using a unique dataset with explicit information on social circles, I find robust and significant positive effects of relative performance on self-reported health and negative effects on detrimental health behavior such as smoking and obesity. People that consider themselves poorer than their circle of acquaintances are significantly less likely to report good health. I further show that this effect exhibits asymmetries, i.e., being worse off than one’s circle of acquaintances has a strong negative effect, whereas being better off exhibits only a mild positive effect. Furthermore, groups with lower absolute income are more strongly affected by the relative performance effect than are groups with high absolute income. I also document that the standard approach of artificially constructing reference groups yields weaker and insignificant results. JEL Classification: I14. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://cmr.uni-koeln.de/sites/cmr/pdf/Schoen/HealthSocialComparison.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
