Are Youths on Income Support Less Happy? Evidence from Australia

Wang-Sheng Lee and Umut Oguzoglu ()

No 2709, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The central research question addressed in this paper is how receipt of income support payments affects the well-being of youths. Using 1997-2004 panel data from a nationally representative survey of Australian youths, we attempt to estimate the size of the welfare stigma faced by Australian youths, where stigma is defined as the effect of welfare receipt on reported happiness levels. In analysing the determinants of happiness, we argue that it is important to control for dynamics and initial conditions. The latter arguably measures an initial setpoint of happiness which the psychological literature has found strong support for. In contrast to the general findings of the existence of a welfare stigma for adults, based on our results using dynamic panel probit models, our findings suggest that for Australian youths, there is a small negative but not statistically significant stigma associated with welfare receipt.

Keywords: well-being; welfare stigma; youths; happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 I31 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2007-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: Australian Economic Review, 2007, 40 (4), 369-384

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2709.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Are Youths on Income Support Less Happy? Evidence from Australia (2007)
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:iza:izadps:dp2709

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().