Does other people's education make us less happy?

• I examine the relationship of reference group education on subjective well-being.
• I find that reference group education is negatively correlated with individual's subjective well-being.
• The results hold even when I control for reference group income.
• The results are robust to alternative measures of subjective well-being and reference groups.

A growing body of literature suggests that the extent to which people feel happy with their lives depends, at least partially, on how they compare to those around them. Much of this literature, however, has focused on the relative effect of income on happiness while other factors such as education, marriage, or leisure have received less attention. In this study, I extend this line of inquiry by investigating how individuals’ level of education, as well as the average level of education of their reference group, influences their happiness. Using longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, I find that, even after controlling for an individual's own education, higher reference group education is associated with lower levels of happiness. More educated people, however, are found to be less affected by social comparison. The panel nature of the HILDA dataset, and additional tests, indicate that the negative association between happiness and reference group education is not driven by people's (changing) interpretations of the happiness scale, self-selection, or the income of their reference group. Additional robustness tests show that the results are not sensitive to variations in the definition of a reference group.