Unemployment and subjective well-being 2013 Master thesis

Unemployment and subjective well-being

2013

Master thesis

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Title:

Unemployment and subjective well-being

Content

Part Page

Introduction 2

Theory and hypotheses 4

Methodology 7 Research/Discussion of results 11 Conclusion 22 Limitations 24 References 25

Abstract

Happiness is often considered as the most important thing to have in life. Someone is happy when he or she experiences satisfaction in life, feels frequent joy and only sometimes feels unpleasant emotions like sadness and anger. Unemployment seems to affect the happiness of a person in a negative way. This research shows that people from different age categories score different on subjective well-being; the old aged are significantly unhappier than the middle and young aged. However there is no difference in subjective well-being between the happiness of the different age categories of the unemployed. This research also shows that the higher the unemployment rate is the lower the subjective well-being of the unemployed is. The youth unemployment rate also affects the happiness of the people significantly. It is surprising to see that the youth unemployment rate affects the old aged the most and the young aged the least.

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Introduction

Nowadays unemployment is something most people come against in their life; either it happens to themselves or to someone in their environment (Garz, 2012). In todays’ economy companies struggle to survive and often have to lay off large amounts of their employees. There is a lot of media attention for the crisis. This affects the subjective well-being of the people. There have been performed a lot of empirical studies about the determinants of happiness, although most literature is about the relation between the income and happiness. This paper is about

unemployment and the effects on the subjective well-being of the unemployed person, different age categories will also be analyzed.

Happiness is often considered as the ultimate goal in life, everybody wants to be happy (Frey and Stutzer, 2001). The pursuit of happiness is even listed in the United States Declaration of

Independence of 1776 as an unalienable right, next to the right to life and the right to liberty. Subjective well-being is obviously subjective; everyone has their own opinion of what happiness is and when to be happy. Observed behavior thus is not a complete indicator of individual well-being, we need to use the judgment of the individual himself.

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This research investigates the effects of unemployment and the unemployment rate on subjective well-being through literature and empirical research. Research into the effects from

unemployment on subjective well-being has been performed multiple times. This research is different because this effect will be investigated for different age groups and over different countries and the effect from the unemployment rate on the individual is take into account. The factor added to the research is age. Does the unemployment rate also affect happiness and does this effect differ between age groups? For this research all European countries that have participated in the European social survey edition 2010 will be used. Countries like Greece and Spain have high youth unemployment rates compared to countries like the Netherlands and Germany (CBS, 2012). The percentages of unemployment differ a lot between European

countries (CBS, 2012). In Greece and Spain the unemployment grade for the youth (between the ages of 15-25) is higher than fifty percent today. The European countries with the lowest

unemployment grades are Germany and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands this grade is nine point two percent and in Germany this grade is even lower with eight percent. Clark and Oswald (1994) found out in their research that the young seem to be affected the least by unemployment. Whether this still counts is the question, with the high youth unemployment and the economic crisis the youth do not have such a bright future as in 1994.

This research aims to investigate the relation between unemployment and the unemployment rate with subjective well-being and how this differs for different age groups, using data from

different European countries. The research question for this article is:

‘How does being unemployed and the unemployment rate affect subjective well-being and do these effects differ between persons of different age?’

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Theory and hypotheses

In this section the theoretical framework is introduced, based on prior research on the subjects. The concept subjective well-being is presented first, after that unemployment and subjective well-being are discussed together and the last concepts are age and the unemployment rate.

Subjective well-being

Happiness (in this research synonym with subjective well-being) is fundamental to human experience and most people are at least mildly happy most of the time (Diener, 1996). In most societies happiness is a highly valued goal and of great importance to people (Fisher, 2010). Happiness in the form of joy appears in almost every typology of basic human emotions. Wilson (1967) said a happy person can be defined as young, healthy, well-educated, well-paid,

extroverted, optimistic, worry-free, married person with high self-esteem, job morale, modest aspirations of either sex, and have a wide range of intelligence. Since then a lot of studies have been performed about happiness and also a lot of different definitions have been developed. In this article the definition of happiness from Fisher (2010) will be used.

Happiness is defined in many ways, the largest divide is between hedonic and eudaimonic views. Hedonic views refer to pleasant feelings and favorable judgments, whereas eudaimonic views involve doing what is right following virtues, being morally right and being true to yourself (Fisher, 2010). In this research the hedonic view will be used, because research has shown that this view is the most important dimension in describing individuals’ affective experiences or pleasantness-unpleasantness. A person scores high on subjective well-being when he or she experiences satisfaction in life, feels frequent joy and only sometimes feels unpleasant emotions like sadness and anger (Veenhoven, 2008). A person is not happy when he or she is not satisfied with life, has little joy and affection and frequently experiences negative emotions such as anger and anxiety.

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well-being are healthier and have a better social life (Lyubomirsky et al, 2005). It is thus

interesting to see what effects unemployment has on subjective being since subjective well-being has consequences of itself.

Unemployment and subjective well-being

In this research unemployment entails people who do not have a paid job. This variable contains people who have been actively seeking for a job the last seven days and people who do not have a job and are not seeking are also included in the unemployment variable.

Employment is an essential factor in life to be happy (van der Meer and Wielers, 2013). There is no situation in which an unemployed person scores higher on subjective well-being than a person who does have a job. Employment is an essential achievement, having no job at all is worse in terms of happiness than being in a job in which the person is not satisfied.

Garz (2012) found that mass unemployment rates turn the public opinion pessimistic; which will lead to a decrease in subjective well-being for the whole community. Unemployment is ranked as the most important problem to face society. Kahneman and Krueger (2006) found that low subjective well-being is experienced after recent negative changes of circumstances. Becoming unemployed is one of these negative changes which lower the happiness of people experiencing having no jobs. It does not seem to matter from which gender the person is. There are effects from age, but Kahneman and Krueger (2006) say that the effects from age seem to be rather complex. Age will be discussed further on in this article.

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preserved. The drop in subjective well-being is larger for people without a job who have a high commitment to the labor market (Jackson, 1983). Bockerman and Ilmakunnas (2006) also found that unemployment not always leads to a decrease in happiness. In this article the following hypotheses will be researched to see whether the hypothesis is right or not:

H1: Unemployment leads to a decrease in subjective well-being

Age

There seems to be an U-shape in age regarding too subjective well-being (Clark and Oswald, 1994). Happiness scores on average the lowest when a person is in his mid-thirties. When we look at the subjective well-being of the unemployed by age Clark and Oswald (1994) found that the young (people aged less than twenty-five years old) are the least affected in their subjective well-being through unemployment. This might be because of the thought there are more people like them, since mostly the unemployment rate is the highest for this group. This makes that young find being unemployed less stressful than the older people and some even stay voluntarily unemployed. Jackson (1983) found that the transition from employment to unemployment and vice versa are followed by high levels of stress, so a decline in subjective well-being. The young are probably just starting their working life so have not ever been in a paid job. This could be why the younger aged group is less affected in their happiness by unemployment. They are just between school and having their first real job, called frictional unemployment. Younger people suffer less when they lose their job (Clark and Oswald, 1994). In this article will be looked into whether the young are still the least affected in their subjective well-being through or whether this has changed. The rate of youth unemployment is rising, chances of having a career or a job decrease because of the crisis (CBS, 2012). The following hypothesis can be derived:

H2: The subjective well-being of the unemployed is lower for older than for younger people

Unemployment rate

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particular region or age group is high this affects the happiness of the unemployed less. This corresponds with a study done by Platt and Kreitman (1985), which showed that suicide ratings under unemployed men is lower when there is more unemployment in the region.

Macroeconomics are of great importance to well-being ,the reaction of the people en masse is strongly correlated with the GDP per capita, so GDP affects the countries happiness (Clark and Oswald, 1994). However these researches are in contradiction with the research Stanca (2009) performed. He found that the well-being costs of being unemployed are larger in countries where unemployment is high and GDP per capita is high. Di Tella et al (2003) found that recessions cause a drop in subjective well-being and the higher the unemployment rate is the unhappier the people are.

In this research the focus is not on the nations happiness but at the happiness of the individual. It will be investigated whether the unemployment rate of a country influences the happiness of an individual and whether this effect is positive or negative. In the part about age is already mentioned that the youth unemployment is rising, but that the young are the least affected by unemployment. In this research it is tested whether the youth is more affected in their happiness by the high rate of unemployment than other age categories are. Also there will looked at whether unemployed people are less affected by unemployment when there are more people around them who are also unemployed.

H3: The young aged people are more affected in their subjective well-being by a high youth unemployment rate than the people from other age categories are

H4:Unemployed people in countries where the unemployment rate is high are happier than unemployed people in countries where the unemployment rate is low

Methodology

For this research the newest existing dataset (which is from 2010) will be used from the

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In this research data from several European countries is included. Data from the following countries is used here: Hungary, United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Israel, Ireland, Norway, Greece, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Slovakie, Slovenia, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, Croatia, Portugal, Poland, Cyprus, Czech Republic and Denmark.

Variables

The variables that are going to be used in this research from the 2010 dataset to test the hypotheses and answer the research question are:

 Subjective well-being

The question which is used in this research to measure the subjective well-being of a person is; ‘Taken all thing together, how happy would you say you are?’(c1). The question should be answered rating on an eleven point scale, where 0 stands for very unhappy and 10 for extremely happy.

 Age

The age of the respondent is measured in years; the question which will be used here is F3. In this research the age of the respondent is important since we want to know whether the subjective well-being of the unemployed differs between different age groups. The age group which is relevant here is the range from 16 to 64. Before the age of sixteen a person is assumed not to be working yet and after 64 it is assumed that the person is not working anymore. Within this age range three age groups are created; young from 16-24, middle aged 25 years thru 54 and old aged from 55 till 65

 Unemployment

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analysis to only have the groups employed and the unemployed. No distinction is made between the respondents who are unemployed and not looking for a job and persons who are looking for a job. The respondents are marked 0 or 1. The 0 stands for people who are in paid work and the people who are marked with a 1 are unemployed. Unemployment is a nominal variable.

 Unemployment rate

The unemployment rates are generated from the data set from the European Social Survey 2010.

Control variables

To make sure that only the effect from unemployment on subjective well-being is measured control variables will be used. There are other phenomena which can cause a change in the subjective well-being of people. The factors that will be control variables in this research are having a partner (F11), income (F41), education (F15) health (c7) and gender.

Having a partner seems to have a tremendous effect on the subjective well-being of a person. Persons who have a partner have on average the highest levels of subjective well-being (Ballas and Tamar, Clark 1994, 2003). These people experience the lowest level of mental distress (Clark, 1994). The respondents are marked 1 or 2. The people who are marked with a 1 have partner and the respondents marked 2 do not.

Income has a positive effect on subjective well-being (Helliwell, 2003, van der Meer and Wielers, 2013); the unemployed do not receive income out of a job but can have other incomes. An income on which people can live comfortably causes that they score higher on subjective well-being. This means that relative income is more important than absolute income (Ballas and Tranmer, 2012, Clark and Oswald, 1994). The respondents rate the feeling they get from their present income on a scale from 1 to 4. The 1 means that the person thinks he can live

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Furthermore education has an effect on subjective well-being. The effect from education is negative; the explanation for this is that this is that education is seen as an input into a job, a kind of effort, which needs to be compensated for (Ballas and Tranmer, 2012). The variable is coded from 1 to 7, in which 1 is the lowest level of education and 7 the highest.

Gender is coded 1 or 2, 1 stands for male and 2 stands for female. And the last control variable is health; well-being is higher when a person is healthy (Clark, 2003). The variable is coded on a five point Likert scale on which the 1 stands for very good health and 5 stands for a very bad health state.

Number of respondents

When analyzing the unemployment grades it becomes clear that for certain countries there is not any data about unemployment. These countries are Ukraine, Russia and Israel; they will be removed from the analysis since they do not provide the necessary information to perform the analysis which is done for this research. This causes that the total number of respondents drops from 26471 to 23310. The control variables which are used in this research are having a partner, subjective income, subjective general health, gender and education. Only the respondents will be analyzed who filled in all the questions which are necessary to gather the desired results. This narrows the total sample of respondents down to a number of 22779. This is the sample on which the multi-level analysis will be performed.

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Research/Discussion of results

In this part the answer to the research question will be generated by the use of SPSS to analyze the data from the European social survey 2010. As a reminder, the research question in this article is:’ ‘How does being unemployed and the unemployment rate affect subjective well-being

and do these effects differ between persons of different age?’ In the following section I present

the results of my analyses, following the order of my hypotheses.

Subjective well-being per country

The first subject in this result section which will be presented is the subjective well-being per country. In table 1 the subjective well-being per country is given for all people. In this sample are the unemployed as well as the employed. The citizens of Denmark are the happiest, rating their happiness with an average of 8,27 on a scale from 0 to 10. Bulgarians seem to be the least happy people with a score of 5,8 on the eleven point scale. Over all countries the mean

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Table 1 Subjective well-being per country

Mean SWB= Mean Subjective well-being; N= number of respondents; SD= Standard deviation

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Table 2 Employment and subjective well-being

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Table 3 Subjective well-being unemployed per country

Mean SWB= Mean Subjective well-being; N= number of respondents; SD= Standard deviation

Descriptive statistics control variables

In this section the means of subjective well-being per control variable per category are given in tables 4 to 9.

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Table 4 Education level and subjective well-being

In table 5 the means of happiness are displayed according to the health categories. When a person is very healthy the grade for subjective well-being is quit high with an average of 7,77. The grade for subjective well-being is the lowest when the person is the least healthy and judges his health as very bad. This grade is with a 4,52 considerably lower than the 7,77 from the people who are in very good health. The healthier the person is the higher is their mean of subjective well-being.

Table 5 Health and subjective well-being

When looking at the differences between the two genders it can be concluded that women are on average happier than men are (table 6). The difference is not very big with the females scoring 7,15 and the males score 7,08.

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Previously was stated that having a partner or not tremendously affects the happiness of a person. It can be seen in the mean grades of reported subjective well-being (table 5). People who do not have a partner have a considerably lower mean score on subjective well-being with an average grade of 6,61 against 7,39 for the people who do have a partner in life.

Table 7 Having a partner and subjective well-being

In this research subjective income is also a control variable. It is called subjective because the respondent rates his or her own income. Here we also see that the mean subjective well-being goes from high to low according to the rating of the income. The better the respondent thinks his income is the higher the subjective well-being of the person is. Between the highest and lowest mean of subjective well-being is a large difference with means of 8,03 for the people who can live comfortably on their present income and a 5,3 for people who find it very difficult to live from the present income.

Table 8 Subjective income and subjective well-being

When taking age and the mean subjective well-being into account it can be seen that the

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Table 9 Age category and subjective well-being

Unemployment grades

The unemployment rates in the European countries which will be analyzed are very different from each other. The unemployment grades which are mentioned in the introduction are of today. However the dataset is from 2010, so these grades will be taken into account. The unemployment grades can be seen in table 4. The unemployment rates are generated from the data set from the European Social Survey 2010. It can be seen that Spain already had the highest percentage youth unemployment in 2010, the unemployment grade from the people older than 24 is also the highest for Spain. Estonia, Greece and Slovakia also have high grades of youth

unemployment with rates above thirty percent. In every country the youth unemployment grade is higher than the unemployment rate from 25 years and higher.

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TABLE 10 Unemployment rate per country

Results

As mentioned before in the method section multi level modelling will be used to test the

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Table 11 outcomes MLM analysis

Dependent Variable: Subjective well-Being * = p = 0.000; ** = p < .05; *** = not significant

Unemployment

In the literature review is already pointed out that in previous research is stated that

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deviating outcome. It was hypothesized that unemployment leads to a decrease in subjective well-being.

Under the header unemployment in table 11 it can be seen that in this research the effect from unemployment on happiness is also negative with an estimate of -0,31. This effect on subjective well-being is significant with a p value which is smaller than 0,05, which is the significance level for this research. It can be concluded that the effect from unemployment on happiness is

negative, so the first hypotheses is accepted.

Young people are significantly happier than the old aged with an estimate of 0,48. The middle aged seem to be slightly happier than the old aged are. This difference is also a significant one. Which means that the older people are the least happy of all and the young are the happiest. The control variable education does not influence the subjective well-being of people at all with an estimate of 0,00. Whereas health (-0,54) and income (-0,51) have a large negative impact on the subjective well-being of a person. The effect from health and income is significant with a significance level of 0,000. The effect from these control variables is larger than the negative consequences on happiness from being unemployed. Having a partner has a strong positive significant effect on happiness with an estimate of 0,64. Men are on average unhappier than women with an estimate of -0,16, this difference is significant.

Unemployment and age

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categories. So this means that the second hypothesis ’The subjective well-being of the

unemployed is lower for older than for younger people’ should be rejected.

Unemployment rate

The next subject which is going to be discussed is the unemployment rate. In the previous sections is stated that unemployment leads to a decrease in subjective well-being and that the happiness does not differ significantly between different unemployed age categories. In table 4 could already be seen that the employment rates differ a lot between countries and that the youth unemployment is high.

It can be seen under the header unemployment rate and age category that the unemployment rate has a negative effect on happiness. This effect has an estimate of -4,93 and is significant. This means that the higher the unemployment rate is the less happy all people are. The unemployment rate does not only affect the unemployed in happiness. Next the effect from the unemployment rate on happiness is given per age category. The old are the most affected in their happiness through the height of the unemployment rate. The young are the least affected in their subjective well-being.

The third hypothesis is about the youth unemployment. Youth unemployment is rising because of the economic crisis. The third hypothesis states that the young aged where the youth

unemployment is high are more affected in their happiness than other age categories. The effect from the youth unemployment does indeed seem to be negative on all peoples’ happiness. This means that when the unemployment rate of the young becomes higher the people score lower on subjective well-being. This effect is significant with a p value of below 0,05.

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unemployment grade into account. To come back to the hypothesis: ‘The young aged people are

more affected in their subjective well-being by a high youth unemployment rate than the people from other age categories are’, it can be concluded that the hypothesis should be rejected.

To answer the last hypothesis: ‘Unemployed people in countries where the unemployment rate is

high are happier than unemployed people in countries where the unemployment rate is low’ the

numbers under the header unemployed and unemployment rate needs to be used. With an estimate of -1,13 and a p value of 0,000 the unemployed become significantly unhappier when the unemployment rate is high. This means that the last hypothesis in this article should be accepted.

Conclusion

The goal of this research is to gather an answer to the research question: ‘How does being

unemployed and the unemployment rate affect subjective well-being and do these effects differ between persons of different age?’ To formulate the answer to this question all four hypotheses

will be discussed to finally end up with an answer to the research question. The goal with gathering an answer to this research question is to contribute to existing research. This article does that by investigating the relation between unemployment and happiness and exploring the differences between different age categories and using data from multiple European countries.

The first hypothesis is: ’Unemployment leads to a decrease in subjective well-being’. This hypothesis is accepted. It could already be seen from the descriptive statistics in table 1 and 2 that the difference between the mean subjective well-being of the employed and the unemployed is substantial. The mean subjective well-being of the employed is 7,26 and for the unemployed this grade is 6,18. This effect seems to be significant, which means that unemployment indeed leads to a decrease in subjective well-being which is in line with previous research.

The following subject was whether the happiness of the unemployed differs between different age categories. The hypothesis is: ’The subjective well-being of the unemployed is lower for

older than for younger people’. When all people where analyzed, not only the unemployed, there

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significantly unhappier than the young aged. The middle aged do not significantly differ from the old aged. This does not correspond with the theory that there is an U shape in happiness

regarding age (Clark and Oswald, 1994). However when only the unemployed people of different age categories are compared there is no significant difference in the subjective well-being between the distinguished age groups. The second hypothesis has to be rejected; the subjective well-being of the unemployed is not lower for older than for younger people.

The unemployment rate is the next subject which was researched. First the youth unemployment rate is taken into account. The following hypothesis has been set up: ‘The young aged people are

more affected in their subjective well-being by a high youth unemployment rate than the people from other age categories are.’ To answer the question whether the hypothesis can be accepted

the effect from the unemployment rate of the young on happiness is measured first for all age categories and then the difference in effect between the age categories is measured. The effect from the youth unemployment rate is negative for all people; which means that when the

unemployment rate of the young is rising people become less happy. When looking at the effect on the different age groups it is remarkable to see that the middle and old aged are more affected in their happiness by youth unemployment than the young themselves are.

The final hypothesis in this research is: ‘Unemployed people in countries where the

unemployment rate is high are happier than unemployed people in countries where the

unemployment rate is low’. In this research was found that the hypothesis is not right and should

be rejected. It seems that the higher the unemployment rate is the lower the subjective well-being of the unemployed people becomes. This contradicts research which states that the more people are unemployed the less the well-being is affected because there are more people around them who go through the same (Frey and Stutzer (2001), Clark (2003)). Di Tella et al (2003) reported that recessions cause a drop in subjective well-being and that this decrease in happiness grows with the number of people unemployed, that corresponds with this research.

With this information the research question can be answered: ‘How does being unemployed and

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Looking at the unemployment effect on subjective well-being it can be stated that the effect of being unemployed negatively affect happiness. The effects from unemployment do not seem to be significantly different between different unemployed age categories. The youth

unemployment rate and the overall unemployment rate affects the subjective well-being of all age categories in a negative way. However the youth unemployment rate affects the old the most in their happiness followed by the middle aged and the young aged are the least affected. The overall unemployment rate affects the subjective well-being of the unemployed negatively, where it was expected to be the other way around.

Limitations

It could be that the relation that has been found between unemployment and subjective well-being is the other way around. It could be that people who are less happy get laid off, they perform worse than happier people do. However Frey and Stutzer (2001) do state that the main causation seems to clearly run from unemployment to unhappiness.

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