ABSTRACT
This article uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to analyse the effect of within household income comparison on individual life satisfaction. Our within couple and individual fixed-effects panel estimates suggest that gender roles influence subjective well-being (SWB). A primary breadwinner wife decreases a couple’s individual happiness by eight per cent. The article adds to the findings on interdependence of SWB and hints at negative consequences of traditional gender identity norms for individual happiness.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The terms well-being, happiness and life satisfaction are used interchangeably.
2 The McCrary (Citation2008) test for discontinuity estimates a distributional drop of 18.1% (t-ratio = 3.8) for households with a high school degree or less and a drop of 0.4% (t-ratio = 0.04) for households with more than high school education.
3 The absolute income rank difference relates to the gender-specific income distribution.
4 Annual reference income is defined as the income average of identical education, age and regional cells.
5 As additional robustness check, we estimate individual happiness as function of changes in the couple’s relative income ratio. Our results remain robust and are available on request.