You'll Never Walk Alone: Unemployment, Social Networks and Leisure Activities

Mattia Filomena and Matteo Picchio

No 16579, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: We analyse how unemployment affects individuals' social networks, leisure activities, and the related satisfaction measures. Using the LISS panel, a representative longitudinal survey of the Dutch population, we estimate the effects by inverse propensity score weighting in a difference-in-differences design in order to deal with unobserved heterogeneity and unbalanced covariate distribution between treated and control units potentially associated with the dynamics of the outcome variables. We find that, after job loss, individuals increase their network size by strengthening their closest contacts within the family, spending more time with neighbors, and making more use of social media. Although they devote their extra leisure time mostly to private activities, our results do not support the hypothesis of social exclusion following unemployment.

Keywords: social satisfaction; leisure; social exclusion; job loss; unemployment; doubly robust difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J01 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published online in: Oxford Economic Papers , 09 May 2025

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp16579.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: You’ll never walk alone: unemployment, social networks and leisure activities (2025)
Working Paper: You'll never walk alone: unemployment, social networks and leisure activities (2023)
Working Paper: You'll never walk alone: Unemployment, social networks and leisure activities (2023)
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:dp16579

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().