FitzRoy Felix R, Nolan Michael A
University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK.
University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX UK.
J Happiness Stud. 2022;23(1):233-256. doi: 10.1007/s10902-021-00397-y. Epub 2021 May 11.
The importance of both income rank and relative income, as indicators of status, has long been recognised in the literature on life satisfaction and happiness. Recently, several authors have made explicit comparisons of the relative importance of these two measures of income status, and concluded that rank dominates to the extent that reference income becomes insignificant in regressions including both these explanatory variables, and that even absolute or household income, otherwise always positively related to happiness, may lose statistical significance. Here we test this hypothesis with a large UK panel (British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society) for 1996-2017, split by age and retirement status, and find, contrary to previous results, that rank, household income and reference income are all usually important explanatory variables, but with significant differences between subgroups. This finding holds when rank is in its often-used relative form, and also with absolute rank.
收入排名和相对收入作为地位指标的重要性，在关于生活满意度和幸福感的文献中早已得到认可。最近，几位作者对这两种收入地位衡量指标的相对重要性进行了明确比较，并得出结论：在包含这两个解释变量的回归中，排名的主导作用使得参考收入变得微不足道，甚至绝对收入或家庭收入（否则总是与幸福感呈正相关）可能会失去统计显著性。在此，我们使用1996 - 2017年英国大型面板数据（英国家庭面板调查和理解社会调查），按年龄和退休状态进行划分，对这一假设进行检验，结果发现，与之前的结果相反，排名、家庭收入和参考收入通常都是重要的解释变量，但不同子群体之间存在显著差异。当排名采用常用的相对形式以及绝对排名时，这一发现均成立。
