The impact of financial insecurity on the self-employed’s short-term psychological distress: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Pankaj C. Patel and Cornelius A. Rietveld

Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 2020, vol. 14, issue C

Abstract: The earnings of the self-employed are relatively low and volatile, a risk that exacerbated during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Using three two-weeks-apart waves of data from the Understanding America Study, we show that relative to wage workers, the self-employed experience greater psychological distress through self-reported financial insecurity (the chance of running out of money). Using additional cross-sectional data from the COVID-19 Household Impact Survey, we show that the self-reported chance of job loss disproportionally impacts the psychological distress of the self-employed. Together, these results underscore that the economic uncertainties induced by the COVID-19 pandemic hit the self-employed particularly harsh by deteriorating short-term psychological distress. Moreover, our study is informative about the impact of income uncertainty on psychological distress.

Keywords: Financial insecurity; Psychological distress; Self-employment; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 I14 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352673420300627
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobuve:v:14:y:2020:i:c:s2352673420300627

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbvi.2020.e00206

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Venturing Insights is currently edited by Dimo Dimov

More articles in Journal of Business Venturing Insights from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().