Journal Article

Heterogeneity in the relationship between unemployment and subjective wellbeing: a quantile approach

Publication details

Publication date
Published in
Economica
Volume
82
Pages
pp. 865–891
Publisher
Blackwell
ISSN
130427

Summary

Unemployment has been robustly shown to strongly decrease subjective
wellbeing. Using panel quantile regression techniques, we analyse to
what extent the negative impact of unemployment varies along the
(conditional) subjective wellbeing distribution. In our analysis of
British Household Panel Survey data (1996–2008), we find that
individuals with high life satisfaction suffer less from becoming
unemployed. A similar but stronger effect is found for a broad mental
wellbeing variable (GHQ-12). Higher wellbeing seems to act like a safety
net when becoming unemployed. We explore these findings by examining
the heterogeneous unemployment effects over the conditional quantiles of
various life domain satisfactions.

Notes

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