Title: Relative status and well-being
Description: This paper empirically assesses the theory of interpersonal income comparison using individual level  data on suicide deaths in the United States. We model suicide as a choice variable, conditional on  exogenous risk factors, reflecting an individual's assessment of current and expected future utility.  Our empirical analysis considers whether suicide risk is systematically related to the income of others,  holding own income and other individual factors fixed. We estimate proportional hazards and probit  models of the suicide hazard using two separate and independent data sets: (1) the National  ongitudinal Mortality Study and (2) the Detailed Mortality Files combined with the 5 percent Public  Use Micro Sample of the 1990 decennial census. Results from both data sources show that,  controlling for own income and individual characteristics, individual suicide risk rises with reference  group income. This result holds for reference groups defined broadly, such as by county, and more  narrowly by county and one demographic marker (e.g., age, sex, race). These findings are robust to  alternative specifications and cannot be explained by geographic variation in cost of living, access to  emergency medical care, mismeasurement of deaths by suicide, or by bias due to endogeneity of own  income. Our results confirm findings using self-reported happiness data and are consistent with  models of utility featuring "external habit" or "Keeping Up with the Joneses" preferences.