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Using the Indonesia Family Life Survey data, this paper is the first of its kind to explore empirically whether rank-position within one’s community matters to individual perception of where he or she stands on the self-defined economic ladder. By applying a multi-level modeling equation approach on responses to the subjective economic ladder (SEL) question, I find that it is not the mean income or expenditure of a reference group that affects SEL but rather the individual’s ordinal ranking within a reference group (for example, the individual is from the 5th or 40th richest household in the community). Consistent with Hirsch (Hirsch, F.: Social limitation to growth. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1976)), SEL depends significantly more on the rank-position of the positional goods and less on the nonpositional goods owned by the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines what makes us feel richer or poorer than others. It investigates cross-sectional and longitudinal determinants of individuals’ subjective economic status in Indonesia. Using two waves of Indonesian Family Life Surveys, 1997 and 2000, I show that individuals’ perceptions of where they are on the economic scale are more dependent on a number of socioeconomic characteristics, as well as their attitudes towards their future economic status, than their current spending capacities would suggest. I also find significant, albeit weaker, expenditure and income effects on individuals’ subjective economic status once individual fixed effects are controlled for in the regression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]