Wealth and Happiness Revisited – Growing National Income Does Go with Greater Happiness

Social Indicators Research - ``Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all?'' Intuitionsays `yes' but theories of relative utility caution that the answer may...     

An Agricultural Wealth Index for Multidimensional Wealth Assessments

Social scientists have increasingly used asset‐based wealth scores, like the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) wealth index, to assess economic disparities. However, current indices primarily capture wealth in globalized market economies, thus ignoring other forms of prosperity, such as success in agricultural activities. Using a simple extension to the standard estimation of the DHS wealth index, we describe procedures for estimating an agricultural wealth index (AWI) that complements market‐based wealth indices by capturing household success in agricultural activities. We apply this procedure to household data from 129 DHS surveys from over 40 countries with sufficient land and livestock data to estimate a reliable and consistent AWI. We assess the construct validity of the AWI using benchmarks of growth in both adults and children. This alternative measure of wealth provides new opportunities for understanding the causes and consequences of wealth inequality, and how success along different dimensions of wealth creates different social opportunities and constraints for health and well‐being.     

The Family Affluence Scale as a Measure of National Wealth: Validation of an Adolescent Self-Report Measure

One explanation for a lack of consistency in SES-health associations in youth is that parent-based income and occupation measures are inadequate. The Family Affluence Scale (FAS), a four-item measure of family wealth, has been developed in the WHO Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Study as an alternative measure. The aim of this paper is to examine the criterion and construct validity of the FAS as a measure of national absolute wealth in 35 countries. A general measure of national wealth, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the year 2001, corrected for Purchasing Power Parity, was used as a gold standard. For the composite FAS index, there was a similar strength in country rank order correlation (0.87) as with GDP, and a Kappa agreement coefficient of 0.57, indicating good criterion validity. FAS index associations with national health indicators were systematically higher than the values obtained with GDP. These features suggest that FAS can be used with confidence in aggregate analyses of HBSC data that focus on relationships between SES and adolescent health.     

Cross-National Variation in Individual Life Satisfaction: Effects of National Wealth, Human Development, and Environmental Conditions

This study adds to the literature on subjective well-being and life satisfaction by exploring variation in individual life satisfaction across countries. Understanding whether and how individual life satisfaction varies across countries is important because if the goal of development is to increase well-being, we must identify the causes of well-being in different national and regional contexts. Using hierarchical linear modeling techniques, I test the hypothesis that individual well-being does vary across countries, and that national wealth, human development and environmental conditions explain this variation. I also test whether the effects of individual characteristics on life satisfaction (including age, marital status, education, income, employment status, and sex) vary across countries, and which country level characteristics explain these variations. Using individual level data from the World Values Survey, I find that there is significant variation in life satisfaction across countries. There is also significant variation in the slopes of individual predictors of life satisfaction across countries and regions. Regional differences in the effects of individual characteristics on life satisfaction explain most of the between country variation in life satisfaction. This indicates that universal development indicators may not adequately reflect differences in life satisfaction across countries, and that development measurements should better reflect regional differences.

Growing Wealth Gaps in Education

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation. In contrast, this contribution provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth and suggests that we should be at least as concerned about growing wealth gaps in education. Despite overall growth in educational attainment and some signs of decreasing wealth gaps in high school attainment and college access, I find a large and rapidly increasing wealth gap in college attainment between cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. This growing wealth gap in higher educational attainment co-occurred with a rise in inequality in children’s wealth backgrounds, although the analyses also suggest that the latter does not fully account for the former. Nevertheless, the results reported here raise concerns about the distribution of educational opportunity among today’s children who grow up in a context of particularly extreme wealth inequality.     

Explaining the Gender Wealth Gap

To assess and explain the United States’ gender wealth gap, we use the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine wealth accumulated by a single cohort over 50 years by gender, by marital status, and limited to the respondents who are their family’s best financial reporters. We find large gender wealth gaps between currently married men and women, and between never-married men and women. The never-married accumulate less wealth than the currently married, and there is a marital disruption cost to wealth accumulation. The status-attainment model shows the most power in explaining gender wealth gaps between these groups explaining about one-third to one-half of the gap, followed by the human-capital explanation. In other words, a lifetime of lower earnings for women translates into greatly reduced wealth accumulation. After controlling for the full model, we find that a gender wealth gap remains between married men and women that we speculate may be related to gender differences in investment strategies and selection effects.     

Marital Sorting and Parental Wealth

The extent of marital sorting by socioeconomic background has implications for the intergenerational transmission of inequality, the role of marriage as a mechanism for social mobility, and the extent of cross-group interactions within a society. However, studies of assortative mating have disproportionately focused on spouses’ education, rather than their social origins. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and exploiting the unique genealogical design of the data set, we study the degree to which spouses sort on the basis of parental wealth. We find that the estimated correlation in parental wealth among married spouses, after controlling for race and age, is about .4. Importantly, we show that controlling for spousal education explains only one-quarter of sorting based on parental wealth. We show that our results are robust to accounting for measurement error in spousal reports of parental wealth and for selection into and out of marriage.     

The Marriage Wealth Premium Revisited: Gender Disparities and Within-Individual Changes in Personal Wealth in Germany

This study examines the association between marriage and economic wealth of women and men. Going beyond previous research that focused on household wealth, I examine personal wealth, which allows identifying gender disparities in the association between marriage and wealth. Using unique data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (2002, 2007, and 2012), I apply random-effects and fixed-effects regression models to test my expectations. I find that both women and men experience substantial marriage wealth premiums not only in household wealth but also in personal wealth. However, I do not find consistent evidence for gender disparities in these general marriage premiums. Additional analyses indicate, however, that women’s marriage premiums are substantially lower than men’s premiums in older cohorts and when only nonhousing wealth is considered. Overall, this study provides new evidence that women and men gain unequally in their wealth attainment through marriage.     

The Role of Visible Wealth for Deprivation

Social Indicators Research - Motivated by the lack of literature linking actual to perceived relative deprivation, this paper assesses the role of visibility in goods and assets vis-à-vis...     

Wealth transfer receipt and later life wealth

Wealth ownership is highly concentrated in the U.S. and this inequality may be reproduced in subsequent generations through wealth transfers. Yet we do not know how households respond to the receipt of a wealth transfer and whether time amplifies the initial benefit of a wealth transfer. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, we test whether wealth transfer recipients gain an advantage that cumulates with time. We find that the positive association between transfer amount and present net worth weakens as time elapsed since transfer receipt increases. The larger the wealth transfer, the more its association with net worth is diminished by time since transfer receipt. Though wealth transfers provide recipients with a significant initial advantage, households appear to adapt to wealth transfer receipt by some combination of reduced savings and increased consumption. We demonstrate an association between receiving a larger wealth transfer and one type of increased consumption, gift-giving.     

人口红利、财富积累与经济增长

文章从消费者行为出发,以生命周期假说为分析前提,研究消费者在老龄化的过程中如何积累财富,并对这些消费者行为加总进一步研究社会财富的积累,分析财富增加和劳动力数量下降这一特征事实下的经济增长路径。在理论研究和经验分析的基础上,作者认为判断人口老龄化是否对经济增长造成影响,不能仅从劳动力供给数量上分析,应综合考虑资本、劳动力等因素的变化。通过研究,本文得出的结论是人口老龄化未必使经济增长速度放缓。     

Older Women's Health and Its Impact on Wealth

As many elderly women tend to outlive their spouses, there is a growing population of unmarried elderly women. Unmarried women are worse off than married women both financially and physically. A question that has not been answered is whether and how the relationship between health and wealth differs across elderly women's marital status. Do the negative impacts of health problems cause more serious financial consequences for unmarried elderly women than married women? Using the five waves of data from the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) from 1993 to 2002, this question is empirically investigated. Results indicate that severe chronic conditions result in 4 to 10% greater wealth depletion for unmarried women than married women. This finding calls for heightened awareness of the negative financial consequences of health problems and also calls for increased lifetime earning potential, reconsideration of women's retirement benefits, and greater attention to preventive care.     

On Net Intergenerational Wealth Flows: An Update

Almost 30 years have passed since I introduced the concept of “net intergenerational wealth flows” in a PDR essay, “Toward a restatement of demographic transition theory.” A great deal of research has been published since then, and accordingly an update is needed. That research suggests the following propositions. Immediately before fertility transition, children's farm labor may not quite offset their consumption, although much depends on how far into adulthood they continue to perform at least some work for their parents. In premodern times children may have paid their way because of lower consumption. Research on the pre‐transitional value of children's work produced contradictory results because it examined both hunter‐gatherer societies, in which both adults and children worked comparatively few hours, and farming societies, in which both worked longer hours. In pre‐transitional societies, the insurance value of children was almost unlimited. For most people in most societies, alternative ways of maintaining savings from the earlier to the later stage of the life cycle first became available only when large‐scale investment in children's education was possible. The costs and gains from that investment played a major role in the onset of the fertility transition.     

Cohabitation History,Marriage, and Wealth Accumulation

This study extends research on the relationship between wealth accumulation and union experiences, such as marriage and cohabitation. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we explore the wealth trajectories of married individuals in light of their premarital cohabitation histories. Over time, marriage positively correlates with wealth accumulation. Most married persons with a premarital cohabitation history have wealth trajectories that are indistinguishable from those without cohabitation experience, with one exception: individuals who marry their one and only cohabiting partner experience a wealth premium that is twice as large as that for married individuals who never cohabited prior to marrying. Results remain robust over time despite cohabiters’ selection out of marriage, yet vary by race/ethnicity. We conclude that relationship history may shape long-term wealth accumulation, and contrary to existing literature, individuals who marry their only cohabiting partners experience a beneficial marital outcome. It is therefore important to understand the diversity of cohabitation experiences among the married.     

Money and Happiness: Income,Wealth and Subjective Well-Being

Social Indicators Research - We examine the complex relationship between money and happiness. We find that both permanent income and wealth are better predictors of life satisfaction than current...     

The Impact of Family Size on Wealth Accumulation in Rural Thailand

Abstract. We examine the effect of socio-economic covariates on infant mortality in China in the 1980s, particularly the role of previous birth interval and mother's education, using an event history approach with data from the 1988 Two per Thousand Fertility Survey. We use a Bayesian model averaging strategy that takes account of model uncertainty as well as parameter uncertainty. A standard stepwise logistic regression analysis finds no statistically significant relationship between the preceding birth interval and infant survival after controlling for socio-demographic factors, but this finding is reversed when the Bayesian model averaging approach is adopted. However, the method finds less support than a standard stepwise approach for the role of mother's education. We consider the model-fitting criterion of predictive power when applied to out-of-sample observations, and show that Bayesian model averaging outperforms the stepwise approach. We conclude that, even with large sample sizes, the interpretation of results can vary substantially according to model selection and fitting criteria.     

Son Preference in Indian Families: Absolute Versus Relative Wealth Effects

The desire for male children is prevalent in India, where son preference has been shown to affect fertility behavior and intrahousehold allocation of resources. Economic theory predicts less gender discrimination in wealthier households, but demographers and sociologists have argued that wealth can exacerbate bias in the Indian context. I argue that these apparently conflicting theories can be reconciled and simultaneously tested if one considers that they are based on two different notions of wealth: one related to resource constraints (absolute wealth), and the other to notions of local status (relative wealth). Using cross-sectional data from the 1998–1999 and 2005–2006 National Family and Health Surveys, I construct measures of absolute and relative wealth by using principal components analysis. A series of statistical models of son preference is estimated by using multilevel methods. Results consistently show that higher absolute wealth is strongly associated with lower son preference, and the effect is 20%–40% stronger when the household’s community-specific wealth score is included in the regression. Coefficients on relative wealth are positive and significant although lower in magnitude. Results are robust to using different samples, alternative groupings of households in local areas, different estimation methods, and alternative dependent variables.     

Inequality in Education and Wealth in Tanzania: A 25-Year Perspective

Social Indicators Research - The literature on inequality in Tanzania has been dependent on limited rounds of methodologically different household budget surveys. The literature in question...     

Consanguinity and Other Marriage Market Effects of a Wealth Shock in Bangladesh

This paper uses a wealth shock from the construction of a flood protection embankment in rural Bangladesh coupled with data on the universe of all 52,000 marriage decisions between 1982 and 1996 to examine changes in marital prospects for households protected by the embankment relative to unprotected households living on the other side of the river. We use difference-in-difference specifications to document that brides from protected households commanded larger dowries, married wealthier households, and became less likely to marry biological relatives. Financial liquidity-constrained households appear to use within-family marriage (in which one can promise ex-post payments) as a form of credit to meet up-front dowry demands, but the resultant wealth shock for households protected by the embankment relaxed this need to marry consanguineously. Our results shed light on the socioeconomic roots of consanguinity, which carries health risks for offspring but can also carry substantial benefits for the families involved.