Literature has established that, on a macroeconomic level, income inequality has a negative effect on average life satisfaction. An unresolved question is, however, which income groups are harmed by income inequality. In this paper we investigate this relationship at the microeconomic level combining national indicators of income inequality with individual data of life satisfaction from the World Values Survey for 39 countries over a period of 25 years.

The dataset consists of 138,193 observations from 39 countries, including 22 European countries, 6 Asian countries, 5 countries from the Middle East and North Africa, 2 Latin American countries and 4 other Western countries.

Data sources: World Values Survey and European Values Survey (WVS/EVS), Solt’s World Income Inequality Database (SWIID, Solt 2016), the World Inequality Database (WID) and the World Bank.