Happiness as a guide to labor market policy

Jo Ritzen
Additional contact information
Jo Ritzen: Maastricht University, the Netherlands, and IZA, Germany

IZA World of Labor, 2015, No 149, 149

Abstract: Measures of individual happiness, or well-being, can guide labor market policies. Individual unemployment, as well as the rate of unemployment in society, have a negative effect on happiness. In contrast, employment protection and unemployment benefits can contribute to happiness—though when such policies prolong unemployment, the net effect on national happiness is negative. Active labor market policies that create more job opportunities increase happiness, which in turn increases productivity. Measures of individual happiness should therefore guide labor market policy more explicitly.

Keywords: happiness; well-being; employment; labor markets; employment protection; wage-income distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J21 J28 J31 J64 J83 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wol.iza.org/articles/happiness-as-guide-to-labor-market-policy-1.pdf (application/pdf)
http://wol.iza.org/articles/happiness-as-guide-to-labor-market-policy (text/html)

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:iza:izawol:journl:y:2015:n:149

Access Statistics for this article

IZA World of Labor is currently edited by Pierre Cahuc

More articles in IZA World of Labor 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 Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ().