IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/italej/v2y2016i3d10.1007_s40797-016-0037-8.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Perceived Social Position and Objective Inequality: Do They Move Together? Evidence from Europe and the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Chiara Assunta Ricci

    (Sapienza University of Rome)

Abstract

According to the literature on social class analysis, both subjective and objective dimensions should be considered, since the perception of social position can influence economic behaviour and choices. The aim of this paper is to investigate objective and perceived social position inequality in six different countries from the 1990s to the 2000s in order to find out whether these dimensions move together or are independent from each other. The results suggest that people perceive themselves as more similar/dissimilar to other members of society than what income-based and other objective aspects show. In particular, considering the whole sample, evidence of an increasing income distance between social groups is found, while we observe no increase in inequality in perceptions when controlling individual characteristics. Consequently, the dynamics of perceptions can help explain, for example, the empirical evidence regarding the lack of reaction to the rise of economic disparities and the general emulative consumption behaviours associated with increasing inequality detected in some countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Chiara Assunta Ricci, 2016. "Perceived Social Position and Objective Inequality: Do They Move Together? Evidence from Europe and the United States," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 2(3), pages 281-303, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:italej:v:2:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s40797-016-0037-8
    DOI: 10.1007/s40797-016-0037-8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40797-016-0037-8
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s40797-016-0037-8?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Roberto Golinelli & Giuseppe Parigi, 2004. "Consumer Sentiment and Economic Activity: A Cross Country Comparison," Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis, OECD Publishing, Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys, vol. 2004(2), pages 147-170.
    2. Salvatore Rizzello, 2000. "Economic Change, Subjective Perception and Institutional Evolution," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(2), pages 127-150, May.
    3. George A. Akerlof & Rachel E. Kranton, 2000. "Economics and Identity," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 115(3), pages 715-753.
    4. Fortin, Nicole & Lemieux, Thomas & Firpo, Sergio, 2011. "Decomposition Methods in Economics," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 1, pages 1-102, Elsevier.
    5. Eduardo Lora & Johanna Fajardo, 2013. "Latin American Middle Classes: The Distance Between Perception and Reality," ECONOMIA JOURNAL OF THE LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION, ECONOMIA JOURNAL OF THE LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION, vol. 0(Fall 2013), pages 33-60, August.
    6. Eduardo Lora & Johanna Fajardo, 2013. "Latin American Middle Classes: The Distance Between Perception and Reality," Economía Journal, The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association - LACEA, vol. 0(Fall 2013), pages 33-60, August.
    7. Oaxaca, Ronald, 1973. "Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 14(3), pages 693-709, October.
    8. Barsky R. & Bound J. & Charles K.K. & Lupton J.P., 2002. "Accounting for the Black-White Wealth Gap: A Nonparametric Approach," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 97, pages 663-673, September.
    9. Tito Boeri & Andrea Brandolini, 2004. "The Age of Discontent: Italian Households at the Beginning of the Decade," Giornale degli Economisti, GDE (Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia), Bocconi University, vol. 63(3-4), pages 449-487, December.
    10. Sergio Firpo & Nicole M. Fortin & Thomas Lemieux, 2009. "Unconditional Quantile Regressions," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 77(3), pages 953-973, May.
    11. Chiara Assunta Ricci, 2016. "The mobility of Italy’s middle income group," PSL Quarterly Review, Economia civile, vol. 69(277), pages 173-197.
    12. Alan S. Blinder, 1973. "Wage Discrimination: Reduced Form and Structural Estimates," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 8(4), pages 436-455.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. M. Grazia Pittau & Roberto Zelli, 2023. "Anchoring Measurement of the Middle‐Income Class to Subjective Evaluation," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 69(1), pages 60-75, March.
    2. Alexi Gugushvili & Olga Zelinska, 2023. "What are the Trends and Explanations of Perceived Social Mobility in Poland?," Applied Research in Quality of Life, Springer;International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, vol. 18(2), pages 811-832, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chiara Assunta Ricci, 2016. "Perceived Social Position and Income Inequality: Do They Move Together? Evidence from Europe and the United States," LIS Working papers 667, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    2. Anna Lukiyanova, 2013. "Earnings inequality and informal Employment in Russia," HSE Working papers WP BRP 37/EC/2013, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    3. Sonja C. Kassenboehmer & Mathias G. Sinning, 2014. "Distributional Changes in the Gender Wage Gap," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 67(2), pages 335-361, April.
    4. Trinh Thi, Huong & Simioni, Michel & Thomas-Agnan, Christine, 2018. "Decomposition of changes in the consumption of macronutrients in Vietnam between 2004 and 2014," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 259-275.
    5. Mathä, Thomas Y. & Porpiglia, Alessandro & Ziegelmeyer, Michael, 2017. "Household wealth in the euro area: The importance of intergenerational transfers, homeownership and house price dynamics," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 1-12.
    6. Aurora Galego & João Pereira, 2014. "Decomposition of Regional Wage Differences Along the Wage Distribution in Portugal: The Importance of Covariates," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 46(10), pages 2514-2532, October.
    7. Rosalia Castellano & Gaetano Musella & Gennaro Punzo, 2019. "Exploring changes in the employment structure and wage inequality in Western Europe using the unconditional quantile regression," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 46(2), pages 249-304, May.
    8. Anglade, Boaz & Useche, Pilar & Deere, Carmen Diana, 2017. "Decomposing the Gender Wealth Gap in Ecuador," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 19-31.
    9. Irene Ferrari, 2020. "The nativity wealth gap in Europe: a matching approach," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 33(1), pages 33-77, January.
    10. Antonio Garofalo & Rosalia Castellano & Gennaro Punzo & Gaetano Musella, 2018. "Skills and labour incomes: how unequal is Italy as part of the Southern European countries?," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 52(4), pages 1471-1500, July.
    11. Gloria Moroni, 2018. "Explaining Divorce Gaps in Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills of Children," Discussion Papers 18/16, Department of Economics, University of York.
    12. Seneviratne, Prathi, 2020. "Gender wage inequality during Sri Lanka’s post-reform growth: A distributional analysis," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    13. Girma Gezimu Gebre & Hiroshi Isoda & Dil Bahadur Rahut & Yuichiro Amekawa & Hisako Nomura, 2021. "Gender Gaps in Market Participation Among Individual and Joint Decision-Making Farm Households: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 33(3), pages 649-683, June.
    14. VAN KERM Philippe & YU Seunghee & CHOE Chung, 2014. "Wage differentials between native, immigrant and cross-border workers: Evidence and model comparisons," LISER Working Paper Series 2014-05, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER).
    15. Petreski, Marjan. & Mojsoska-Blazevski, Nikica., 2015. "The gender and motherhood wage gap in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia : an econometric analysis," ILO Working Papers 994895293402676, International Labour Organization.
    16. Anna Lukiyanova, 2015. "Earnings inequality and informal employment in Russia," The Economics of Transition, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, vol. 23(2), pages 469-516, April.
    17. Sergio P. Firpo & Nicole M. Fortin & Thomas Lemieux, 2018. "Decomposing Wage Distributions Using Recentered Influence Function Regressions," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 6(2), pages 1-40, May.
    18. Zanola, Roberto & Vecco, Marilena & Jones, Andrew, 2021. "A place for everything and everything in its place: New York's role in the art market," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(3), pages 215-224.
    19. Girma Gezimu Gebre & Hiroshi Isoda & Dil Bahadur Rahut & Yuichiro Amekawa & Hisako Nomura, 0. "Gender Gaps in Market Participation Among Individual and Joint Decision-Making Farm Households: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 0, pages 1-35.
    20. Rosalia Castellano & Gaetano Musella & Gennaro Punzo, 2017. "Structure of the labour market and wage inequality: evidence from European countries," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 51(5), pages 2191-2218, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Inequality; Perceived social position; Social classes;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:italej:v:2:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s40797-016-0037-8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.